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Candace Owens and nodding donkey Ian Carrol discuss pornography and, in case you haven’t guessed already, she and Ian Carrol both agree that it’s, of course, the Jews who are responsible for not just the popularity of porno but that it was also “created” by the Jews They discuss Al Goldstein, an American from a secular Jewish family who, amongst many other endeavours, was heavily involved in the porn industry. The quote Candace Owens refers to, is of him saying that “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks” and it is, indeed something he actually said. Now you’d think that someone like Candace, who once championed common sense and making an effort to research things in great detail, would provide some much-needed context for this. But no, she doesn’t. To her and the donkey sitting next to her, it’s all very much one dimentional. Here’s some truth about Al Goldstein, which took me quite literally less than three minutes to research. Al Goldstein was a larger than life character, an arrogant, self-absorbed, nasty idiot who described himself as an “angry Jew”. He didn’t practise Judaism and, at best, was just a cultural Jew. He did indeed despise Christian culture, but how one comes to the conclusion that this reflects the broader views of all Jews is, quite frankly, retarded. Al despised all religions, saying, “I judge religions on the basis of what they do, and I’m afraid to say that the insidious power of religion has been with us for thousands of years. I do not respect irrationality, stupidity, or superstition.” He also made a statement in which he proclaimed that he is a god, “I’m the god of my own universe. I create my own morality, my own reality. The Christians have their God, but I’ve got Screw magazine and my dick.” His whole life was a circus act, and it wasn’t a reflection of real Jewish identity. Fun fact, again one that takes less than a minute to find, is that Jewish Americans, and no doubt Jews elsewhere, have a divorce rate lower than the national average. Regardless of their politics, they’re generally more aligned with conservative values. Al most definitely wasn’t, and his comments regarding “Jews inventing porn” are nonsensical. Porn has been around for thousands of years in one form or another. It is not some exclusive invention of the last few decades. Finally, and quite ironically, Candace mentions Japan and how Japan is not consumed by pornography. But again, the thousands of brain cells she’s lost over the last few years, during which she has become “anti-Zionist”, failed to make her realise that pornography is actually huge in Japan. In fact, Japan’s overall adult industry is estimated to be worth 4-5 trillion yen annually, with anime porn being one of the most searched-for categories on sites like Pornhub. The confirmation bias of people like Owens and Carrol represents the ongoing decline of brain function within our societies. These idiots are driven by an arrogance in which they think they’re highly intelligent, but in reality, each and every time, it makes them look like intellectual dimwits scraping the bottom of a barrel.
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Candace Owens and nodding donkey Ian Carrol discuss pornography and, in case you haven’t guessed already, she and Ian Carrol both agree that it’s, of course, the Jews who are responsible for not just the popularity of porno but that it was also “created” by the Jews They discuss Al Goldstein, an American from a secular Jewish family who, amongst many other endeavours, was heavily involved in the porn industry. The quote Candace Owens refers to, is of him saying that “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks” and it is, indeed something he actually said. Now you’d think that someone like Candace, who once championed common sense and making an effort to research things in great detail, would provide some much-needed context for this. But no, she doesn’t. To her and the donkey sitting next to her, it’s all very much one dimentional. Here’s some truth about Al Goldstein, which took me quite literally less than three minutes to research. Al Goldstein was a larger than life character, an arrogant, self-absorbed, nasty idiot who described himself as an “angry Jew”. He didn’t practise Judaism and, at best, was just a cultural Jew. He did indeed despise Christian culture, but how one comes to the conclusion that this reflects the broader views of all Jews is, quite frankly, retarded. Al despised all religions, saying, “I judge religions on the basis of what they do, and I’m afraid to say that the insidious power of religion has been with us for thousands of years. I do not respect irrationality, stupidity, or superstition.” He also made a statement in which he proclaimed that he is a god, “I’m the god of my own universe. I create my own morality, my own reality. The Christians have their God, but I’ve got Screw magazine and my dick.” His whole life was a circus act, and it wasn’t a reflection of real Jewish identity. Fun fact, again one that takes less than a minute to find, is that Jewish Americans, and no doubt Jews elsewhere, have a divorce rate lower than the national average. Regardless of their politics, they’re generally more aligned with conservative values. Al most definitely wasn’t, and his comments regarding “Jews inventing porn” are nonsensical. Porn has been around for thousands of years in one form or another. It is not some exclusive invention of the last few decades. Finally, and quite ironically, Candace mentions Japan and how Japan is not consumed by pornography. But again, the thousands of brain cells she’s lost over the last few years, during which she has become “anti-Zionist”, failed to make her realise that pornography is actually huge in Japan. In fact, Japan’s overall adult industry is estimated to be worth 4-5 trillion yen annually, with anime porn being one of the most searched-for categories on sites like Pornhub. The confirmation bias of people like Owens and Carrol represents the ongoing decline of brain function within our societies. These idiots are driven by an arrogance in which they think they’re highly intelligent, but in reality, each and every time, it makes them look like intellectual dimwits scraping the bottom of a barrel.

𝔸η𝐓

518,796 views • 1 year ago

Here's another clip from a new Corbyn interview with Al Mayadeen English showing that he has learnt *nothing at all* from the Zionist takedown of his leadership of the Labour Party. It was a capitulation by Corbyn and his advisers which did for him - and us. He still seems not to get that. In this clip he bangs on about "antisemitism" as if there was any real problem of racism against Jews in British society. The main forms of racism in British society - then and now - are state racism and institutionalised racism. These are forms of racism pursued by, and institutionalised in, state actions: notably Islamophobia. And let's not forget that they have been promoted assiduously by the Zionist regime and its racist hench-people in the UK via - amongst others - Neocon think tanks like Policy Exchange and the Henry Jackson Society, the Israel lobby and the Zionists own boy on the streets - Tel-Aviv-Tommy Robinson. Worse, Corbyn endorses his capitulation to the EHRC investigation. He says that "when the report came out, I welcomed the report. I accepted the report, but I also said two things: One, one anti-Semite in the Labour Party is one too many. And secondly the number of cases of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was much exaggerated. There was a very, very small number, and that this had been done for political purposes to attack the overall political project that I was following. I believe that and I stand by that statement." But let's be clear. 1. The EHRC investigation was opened after a campaign by Zionist regime assets and agents including the formally Zionist Jewish Labour Movement, and the Zionist regime agent the Campaign Against Antisemitism and a host of other Zionist bullies. It was not legitimate and should have been rejected by any leader with principles; 2. The investigation itself was nobbled by the fact that the EHRC was infiltrated by Zionists. This was known at the time and I contributed to analysis of this back then. (link in replies) For example the CEO of the EHRC at the time was Rebecca Hilsenrath. She is a genocidal Zionist who was “co-founder of the Hertsmere Jewish Day School, and then Yavneh College in Hertfordshire”. Both of these schools self describe as ‘Zionist’ or ‘Religious Zionist’. Worse, her husband Michael was a trustee of a Zionist charity which funded the CAA - one of the complainants. On top of that the chair of the EHRC was also a Zionist: David Isaac. He was associated with a Tory think tank that also published Stephen Pollard's musings on the Corbynites and "antisemitism". Even the Zionist Rebecca Hilsenrath went public on claims that Isaac was not independent. In addition the EHRC panel of approved counsel included the JLM's Sarah Sackman, (now the Solicitor-General in the genocidal Starmer regime) and Adam Wagner who was instructed by the CAA to present its complaint to the EHRC. (link to full article in replies) No equalities and human rights body should have any Zionists appointed to it since they oppose both Equality and Human Rights. Corbyn could and should have directly attacked the complainants, the EHRC, the report and its findings then. Why on earth will he not do it now? The investigation was a joke and only managed to accuse two people of alleged and ridiculous offences: Ken Livingstone and Pam Bromley. It's truly disgraceful that even now Corbyn won't come out and defend Ken, an Icon of the left who did more than any other living socialist to embed anti-racism in British society. But Corbyn - then and still now - insists on throwing Ken under the bus, just as he did with Jackie Walker (Jackie Walker - HRH, MP, MBE, ABC) , Chris Williamson (Chris Williamson), Marc Wadsworth (Marc Wadsworth) and all the rest. Sadly, Corbyn is showing no sign at all of learning any lessons from the previous failure. Even now he could do so. Your Party needs to declare that it is anti-Zionist, for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees, against the "two state" solution, for one state Palestine and for the dismantling of the Zionist colony and decolonisation of Palestine. Over to you Zarah Sultana MP #DismantleZionism

David Miller

16,823 views • 11 months ago

Many persons have shared this video with me. It has 11 million views on Instagram and 70K likes. Thats 70K people without critical thinking or lack of ability to fact check. Stay with me. This is a wild ride. I am not going into details of the person making the claim - because it is Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra is like turmeric-milk. You think milk becomes a "super-food" when turmeric enters the scene, but the fact is, turmeric is there just to waste your time. Same with Deepak Chopra. He is an 'embodiment of pseudoscience,' who, once upon a time was a physician, but now fully evolved into shell of "what was once a doctor" currently filled with mystic beliefs, white-washing Ayurveda, preaching transcendental meditation and quantum healing to prevent sickness. Sir Richard Dawkins called Chopra's claims "quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus" and the scientific community has found that Chopra's treatments generally elicit nothing, because Chopra is a fraud who sells $350 meditation glasses to people who cant think for themselves. and Now the video. In it, a younger Deepak Chopra claims "with the power of the mind, one can change poison into nectar and nectar into poison." And he cites an actual scientific study to prove his claims. Only one little problem - that is not what the study concluded. As per Chopra, a study performed at the Ohio State University looked at a group of rabbits fed diet rich in cholesterol. One group showed high cholesterol, while the other showed lower levels of cholesterol. This was stunning, because all the rabbits were the same, they consumed same diet. So, what was different in the rabbit group that had lower cholesterol levels? Chopra says – it was happiness in those rabbits which led to better chemicals and chemical reaction in the brain that changed the cholesterol into a different pathway that did not hurt the heart. Why were they happy? Let us get into one of the most bizarrely misinterpreted study which led to what we now call as “The Rabbit Effect.” A type of rabbit, used in experiments, called the New Zealand white male rabbits, develop heart disease much like humans if fed a high-fat diet. So these rabbits are used to study effects of cholesterol in the heart using “diet experiments.” In 1978, Dr. Robert Nerem and his group fed a group of these rabbits high fat diet. At the end of the study, he measured the animals’ cholesterol, heart rates, and blood pressure. As expected, the cholesterol values were all high and virtually identical to one another. The rabbits had similar genes and ate the same diet. Now they all seemed destined for a heart attack or stroke. Only one aberrant problem. As the last step, Dr. Nerem needed to examine the rabbits’ tiny blood vessels to show cholesterol deposits there too. Looking through the microscope, he expected all the rabbits to show similar fatty deposits on the inside of their arteries. Instead, there was a huge variation in the fatty deposits between the animals. One group of rabbits had 60 percent fewer deposits than the other. What was happening? There was no clear biological explanation to this. They checked every little item they used in the experiment to see if that had caused changes. But every little thing was controlled and accounted for. Except one small thing. The researchers themselves. A Canadian postdoc named Murina Levesque had recently joined the lab. She was an unusually kind and caring individual. When it became apparent that all the animals with fewer fatty deposits were under Murina’s care, the team dug deeper. They noticed that Murina handled the animals differently. When she fed her rabbits, she talked to them, cuddled, and petted them. She did not throw the food at the little animals. She gave them food with love. So, prove this, the research group repeated the experiment, this time with tightly controlled conditions. They compared the little blood vessels of one group of rabbits cared for by Murina (food+love) to the arteries of another group of rabbits cared for in the standard way (only food). They found the same effect again. The paper was published in Science Magazine. This one: Social Environment as a Factor in Diet-Induced Atherosclerosis - So did the study prove that if you are happy, and the mind is free, poisonous substances can turn into nectar? - No, that was not what the study says. Remember – the study showed that high cholesterol levels in the blood was same in all rabbits who were on high fat diet. Only that the cholesterol deposits were lesser in the arteries of those who were fed with “kindness” – meaning who were less “stressed.” The study took the medical world on a wild ride because all the rabbit experiments would have to now look at how emotionally these animals were, to come to better conclusions from the interventions studied. So, a group of researchers specifically looked at “handling” and diet induced cholesterol deposits (atherosclerosis) in rabbits. They found that handling the animals did not have any effect on the atherosclerosis size inside the blood vessels and this was only roughly determined by the amount of cholesterol in food eaten. In the original “Rabbit Effect” study, the amount of food eaten between groups was not looked at. We now know that chronic stress leads to different behavioral patterns which also includes increased eating. Chronic life stress seems to be associated with a greater preference for energy- and nutrient-dense foods, namely those that are high in sugar and fat. Higher the stress, higher amount of food eaten, more the cholesterol and more importantly, more deposits inside the arteries which can be independent of cholesterol levels. How? One possible mechanism for this process is that chronic stress causes small blood vessel injury (endothelial damage), directly activating macrophages (an inflammatory cell), promoting foam cell formation, and generating the formation of atherosclerotic plaque inside small vessels. This mechanism involves numerous variables, including inflammation, signal pathways, lipid metabolism and endothelial function – and has nothing to do with cholesterol going to another pathway because of brain chemicals. Cholesterol is the body is metabolized through the same pathway whether you are happy, sad, or delirious. That is not what the rabbit study claimed or what it proved. It only made way for other studies to show that chronic stress could be an important factor that negatively impact heart and brain health which was independent of the food that you consume. Poison does not become nectar if you are happy and nectar does not become poison if you are sad. That is just Ayurvedic mumbo-jumbo from hocus-pocus self-help gurus who cite “Agni and the Digestive Fire” as the mechanism. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is more believable. If you take rat poison happily, you will still die. If you eat a banana while crying, you won’t die.

TheLiverDoc™

409,193 views • 3 years ago

After seeing a scone recipe posted for Memorial Day, I’ve got a few things to say. And frankly, they won’t be particularly polite. I’m immensely proud to call both the United Kingdom and the United States home. I grew up with traditions from both countries, still split my time between them to this day, and my own children are being raised with that same dual identity. I understand the humour, customs, etiquette, history and cultural differences on both sides of the Atlantic probably better than most people. Which is exactly why this sort of performative nonsense winds up me so much. Because one thing that absolutely doesn’t translate is turning Memorial Day into some twee Instagram aesthetic involving scones, jam and curated “holiday weekend” content. To my fellow Britons, and to others outside the United States who may not fully understand the distinction, Memorial Day isn’t the American equivalent of a bank holiday garden party. Nor is it interchangeable with Veterans Day. Veterans Day in November honours all who have served in the United States military. Memorial Day is entirely different. Memorial Day is for the dead. It exists to honour the men and women who never came home. Just like Rememberance Day. It’s a day rooted in grief, remembrance and sacrifice. That distinction matters. Because of that, my company does not operate on Memorial Day or on Remembrance Day in Britain. That’s always been a hard rule for me and it always will be. The day before, we make one simple memorial post expressing gratitude, remembrance and respect for those who gave their lives. We also explain that we’ll be turning off sales on our website and stepping away from social media entirely for 24 hours. No promotional posts. No sales pitches. No “holiday weekend specials”. The socials go silent because some things deserve dignity rather than being turned into marketing opportunities. Freedom is not free. And reducing remembrance to a sales opportunity has always struck me as profoundly tacky. Which brings me to the scones. Seeing an American woman posting a scone recipe for Memorial Day genuinely made my skin crawl a bit. Not because scones themselves are offensive, obviously, but because the whole thing felt painfully artificial and culturally manufactured. Scones are not associated with Memorial Day in the United States. At all. The average American family gathering for Memorial Day is far more likely to involve a barbecue, burgers, hot dogs or a cookout than cream tea. The eternal British debate over whether the jam or cream goes first isn’t exactly dominating conversation in American cities. And let’s be honest here. Scones aren’t inherently American in the first place. They’re deeply associated with British culture. Tea culture. Country houses. Cream teas. The sort of thing people in Cornwall and Devon still somehow manage to argue about with complete sincerity. Like pineapple on pizza. So when a certain someone, who spent less than two years in the United Kingdom before fleeing back to California at warp speed, suddenly starts presenting herself as the patron saint of jam and scones for an American Memorial Day audience, it comes across as painfully contrived. And somehow even more absurd when the recipe itself was shared in grams and Celsius. I use both systems myself because I live between both countries, so I understood it perfectly well. But the overwhelming majority of Americans bake in teaspoons, tablespoons, cups and Fahrenheit. Marketing a very British-coded scone recipe in European measurements for an exclusively American audience on an American military holiday is such a bizarrely specific level of inauthentic branding that it almost feels like parody. What made it even stranger was the timing of the whole thing. The day before, the Prince of Wales was on a national radio programme being asked, as Duke of Cornwall, how he takes his scones. He said he takes them the same way Queen Elizabeth II did. Then the very next day, up pops an entire promotional post centred around scones, complete with a recipe for Memorial Day. What a coincidence. You could almost admire the opportunism if it weren’t so embarrassingly obvious. Because that’s what this increasingly feels like. Not authenticity. Not cultural appreciation. Branding. Very calculated branding. And very confused branding at that. This is a woman who publicly distanced herself from Britain, criticised the Royal Family, the institution, the press, the culture and the people. She then almost immediately pivoted into selling tea, spreads, biscuits and aggressively British coded lifestyle products. All of it is framed under a title she and her children only possess because of the very institution she claims damaged her. You cannot spend years positioning yourself as oppressed by Britain while simultaneously using British aristocratic styling via a royal peerage to market candles and preserves to Americans on Instagram. At some point the contradiction just becomes ridiculous. Even stranger is the fact this pantry line is only available in the United States while borrowing almost entirely from British imagery and British culinary aesthetics. Tea. Biscuits. Jam. Scones. And now Memorial Day apparently. Which again makes absolutely no cultural sense whatsoever. Memorial Day isn’t a whimsical lifestyle mood board of hers. It’s not a backdrop for curated brunch content. It’s not an excuse to cosplay English tea culture because your brand identity remains fundamentally incoherent. And yes, I feel exactly the same way about all companies running “Celebrate Memorial Day with 20% off!” mattress sales, car dealership blowouts or whatever. The language itself is grotesque. I will not “celebrate” the deaths of American servicemen and women. I’ll honour them. I’ll remember them. There’s a difference and it matters. As President Ronald Regan once said “The American flag does not fly because the wind moves it. It flies with the last breath of each soldier who died protecting it.” The names of those who died serving their country should not be reduced to discount codes, influencer engagement bait or twee social media recipes designed to sell fruit spread. But perhaps that’s the real issue underneath all of this. Nothing ever feels sincere. Every cultural reference, aesthetic choice, every carefully staged lifestyle moment feels reverse engineered for branding purposes rather than rooted in any genuine identity. Which is why the whole thing lands with such a thud. As someone who genuinely loves both Britain and America, I find it exhausting watching someone who barely spent five minutes in the UK attempt to monetise a fantasy version of Britishness whenever it becomes commercially useful. Particularly when it’s attached to a day that is supposed to be about remembering the fallen. It’s tasteless. It’s opportunistic. And it’s entirely on brand for her and her business.

༺𝐻𝑅𝐻 𝐿𝒶𝒹𝓎 𝒥༻ 👑

71,549 views • 2 months ago

Confidence Pro Max: Remembering a Brother, a Filmmaker, and a Warrior Nick’s untimely death is a devastating blow to his family, friends, and Kenya as a whole. We didn’t see it coming, even after he was diagnosed in October 2025 with hypocellular myelodysplastic syndrome (h-MDS), a rare bone marrow disorder. When we went to see him in the hospital, he possessed such positive energy, he was convinced that he would beat this. He was Rambo a "one-man army" and we all believed he could beat it, too. He never looked defeated, or depressed, even as he began to lose weight. When he shaved his head in November, he sent me a photo and asked me to call him "Michael Jordan," after the Chicago Bulls legend whose signature look was a bald head. Even in sickness, he found a reason to smile. I met Nick in 2015, before he became a filmmaker. I remember him sitting in my office wearing a suit, asking for my support to go study filmmaking in Italy. After completing his course in Italy, his first major project upon his return was the award-winning documentary Softie, directed by Sam Soko. The film followed my journey as I ran for political office during the 2017 elections, and Nick was the one behind the drone shots. We became friends, and I enjoyed a front-row seat watching as he went on to document important stories. One of my favourites was his powerful 2021 BBC Africa Eye documentary, "Street Dreams." He directed and filmed a group of seven homeless young men in Nairobi who formed the "Street Family Dance Crew." He embedded with them to capture their raw determination to escape poverty, police harassment, and family issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a story that feels like a distant world today; those dancers used to perform outside nightclubs in the CBD, but the city has since become a ghost town. Many bars closed down and replaced by restaurants that shut their doors by 9:00 PM. It’s a story that captured a time in Nairobi that is long gone. In 2024, Nick and I united as he covered the protests. While I participated in the demonstrations, he worked on an unnamed film and we often discussed safety tips. I was a storyteller before I was an activist, so I knew a thing or two about staying safe in the streets while documenting potentially dangerous stories. When Nick was falsely arrested in May 2025, for allegedly producing the BBC documentary, Blood Parliament - two of the three people arrested with him were working with me. I received a call shortly after their arrest and faced the difficult task of calling my colleagues' parents to deliver the news. The arrest was hostile; they were forced to hand over their phones and passwords, and when their equipment was finally returned, it was infected with spyware. What remains hidden from the public eye after an arrest are the cold cells, the degrading police interrogations, the court arraignments, the stares, and the judgment from both friends and strangers. Sometimes even the loss of clients who don’t want to be associated with “enemies of the state.” On a personal level, the trauma of such an arrest can lead to depression, alcoholism, or insomnia. In Nick’s case, his body crumbled, a hidden disease manifested, and before we could truly understand what it was, it stole him from us. His passing is an indictment of our failed healthcare system. Good healthcare is not free. We do not have enough blood in our blood banks and patients must organize their own donors in both public and private hospitals. Furthermore, specialized medical care is so expensive and out of reach that his family and friends were in the middle of fundraising for a life-saving bone marrow transplant in India. I am glad that he was able to produce his latest work, The People Shall, last year. The documentary is a first-hand eyewitness account of the events of June 25th, 2024, when a new republic was born. In his honour, and in honour of the hundreds of thousands suffering due to poor healthcare in this country, may we take our power back. Nick was good people. He had a positive attitude toward life and brought love and laughter into every room he entered. He could lift heavier weights at the gym than people much older and bigger than him. I had the chance to lift weights with him and his co-accused friends; he was so confident that he was the only one lifting bare-chested. That was 'confidence pro-max,' and he beat us in lifting heavier weights and doing more sets. In September 2025, I woke up early to ensure my son was ready to go drone filming with Nick. My son had recently acquired his drone pilot license, and Nick had taken him under his wing as he worked on a new film - a project he was looking forward to finishing. He surprised us all with his early exit on January 7th, but we thank God we had the chance to spend time with him. As we grieve Nick’s death, may his story inspire you to leave that boring job, find your purpose, and live a life that leaves an impact. I am so grateful for Nick’s life. May God comfort his family and friends and give them strength. He will be dearly missed.

The People’s President

37,999 views • 7 months ago

So Jefferson Morley says that "the evidence does not support the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president." Jeff relies on the eyewitness account of one of the Parkland doctors who treated JFK at Dallas, Bob McClelland. And he says I failed in Case Closed to challenge Dr. McClelland's credibility. Below is an excerpt from CASE CLOSED, Chapter 13, “He Had A Death Look: Parkland and Bethesda." Read it and decide for yourselves what you believe. And check my source notes, almost all based on my own interviews in 1992 with the chief attending Parkland doctors. It is their judgment of Dr. McClelland's account that is critically important. “However, some of the Parkland doctors who treated the President described a gaping wound in the rear of JFK’s head (the occipital region), not the right side (the parietal). If true, this not only contradicted the findings of the autopsy team but was evidence that the President was probably shot from the front, with a large exit hole in the rear of the head. Several Parkland doctors also thought they saw cerebellum, tissue from the base of the brain, on the stretcher or in the operating room. Yet, the autopsy photos of the brain show the cerebellum intact. If the Parkland descriptions of the cerebellum were true, this raised legitimate questions over the authenticity of the photographs of JFK’s brain, which showed no such damage. Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone, in their book High Treason, devote more than thirty pages to highlighting this conflict between the Parkland and Bethesda descriptions of the head wound. However, it is questionable to rely on the Parkland doctors for any assertion about the head wound since, by their own admission, they did not examine it in detail. When Dr. Kemp Clark looked at the wound to determine whether the President could be revived, it was the first time it had been examined. “From what I read in later books, everyone looked at it in detail from the beginning, but that is not true,” recalls Dr. Jenkins. “We were trying to save the President, and no one had time to examine the wounds. As for the head wound, they couldn’t look at it earlier because I was standing with my body against it, and they would only have looked at my pants.”83 “We never had the opportunity to review his wounds,” Dr. Carrico told the author, “in order to describe them accurately. We were trying to save his life.”84 Dr. Adolph Giesecke agrees: “We had no time to examine the wounds. That was to be done by a forensic pathologist, not by us.”85 “I don’t think any of us got a good look at the head wound,” confirms Dr. Perry. “I didn’t examine it or really look at it that carefully.”86 “And when we realized he was dead,” Dr. Baxter recalls, “none of us had the heart to go and examine the head wound while Mrs. Kennedy was in the room. We all just made our way out of the room.”87 “When things were over with,” Dr. Jones says, “you felt it was her time and you should get out of there and let her be alone with him.”88 Dr. Baden of the Select Committee concurs: “Parkland was not concerned with whether the bullet was going from front to back or vice versa, they were only treating the symptoms, not the wounds. Some of them could be good surgeons but lousy pathologists. A third of the time, an autopsy shows something was missed by the treating doctors at the hospital. In unnatural deaths, it is common for the treating physicians to mix up stab wounds and gun shots, and they are wrong half the time about exit or entrance. The Parkland doctors did not clean Kennedy off—there is just no way they could have hazarded a real guess about that wound, since it was covered with blood and tissue. If they say they saw cerebellum, they are just wrong because the cerebellum was perfect. And if they say there was a large hole in the rear of the head, they don’t know what they are talking about since there is nothing there but the entry injury in the rear cowlick. The mistakes in judgments from Parkland are exactly why we have autopsies. “One of the most important aspects of the Zapruder film, often overlooked by the critics, are the frames immediately after the President was shot in the head. It’s very clear on the enhanced frames that there is a wound over the right ear, but the back of the head is clean. That film is incontrovertible evidence that there was no defect on the rear of the head.”89 Yet mistaken descriptions of what the Parkland doctors did and saw continue to be published. High Treason asserts that some doctors examined the wound with a flashlight and that Dr. Jenkins picked the head up from the stretcher to show other doctors the extent of the rear wound.90 The eight principal doctors who attended to JFK on that day all told the author that such reports were false. Moreover, Groden and Livingstone cite early interviews and some testimony before the Warren Commission to support their hypothesis that the Parkland doctors saw a different head wound than the one described at Bethesda.* Yet the Parkland physicians, in their discussions with the author, were almost unanimous in supporting the autopsy findings that the massive exit wound was on the right side (parietal) of the President’s head, not the rear (occipital), and that there was no sign of damaged cerebellum tissue. They insisted that the explainable differences in the wound descriptions between them and the Bethesda doctors have been exploited by conspiracy writers, who created a controversy where none exists. Some admitted that their early statements about the wounds, which they now consider to be mistaken, may have contributed to the confusion. Dr. Bill Midgett, who helped wheel the President from the limousine into trauma room one, says, “The President had quite thick hair, and there was a lot of blood and tissue. All of us were so shocked … and to have Mrs. Kennedy there—none of us stared very closely to see the wound. But it was more parietal than occipital—that much I could see. I did not turn the President over to look, but there was no cerebellum in that car or on the people.” “We did say there was a parietal-occipital wound,” recalls Dr. Carrico. “We did say we saw shattered brain, cerebellum, in the cortex area, and I think we were mistaken. The reason I say that is that the President was lying on his back and shoulders, and you could see the hole, with scalp and brain tissue hanging back down his head, and it covered most of the occipital portion of his head. We saw a large hole on the right side of his head. I don’t believe we saw any occipital bone. It was not there. It was parietal bone. And if we said otherwise, we were mistaken.”91 Dr. Giesecke also admits an error in his original testimony when he described the wound as more occipital. “I guess I have to say that I was wrong in my Warren Commission testimony on the wound and in some of my pronouncements since then. I just never got that good of a look at it. But, for instance, Lifton spent six hours with me trying to get me to say the wounds were like he wanted them. The truth is there was a massive head wound, with brain tissue and blood around it. And with that type of wound you could not get accurate information unless you feel around inside the hole and look into it in detail, and I certainly didn’t do that, nor did I see anyone else do that.”92 Dr. Peters had said that the cerebellum was damaged. “I saw the photograph of the brain when I was in Washington for the Nova program, and I saw the cerebellum was depressed, but it was not lacerated or torn. It is definitely pressed down and that would be the damage I referred to in 1964.… The only thing I would say is that over the last twenty-eight years I now believe the head wound is more forward than I first placed it. More to the side than the rear. I tried to tell Lifton where the wound was, but he did not want to hear.” Dr. Jenkins’s original report also stated he saw cerebellum. “The description of the cerebellum was my fault,” he says. “When I read my report over, I realized there could not be any cerebellum. The autopsy photo, with the rear of the head intact and a protrusion in the parietal region, is the way I remember it. I never did say occipital.”93* “I did not really look at it that closely,” says Dr. Perry. “But like everyone else, I saw it back there. It was in the occipital/ parietal area. The occipital and parietal bone join each other, so we are only talking a centimeter or so in difference. And you must remember the President had a lot of hair, and it was bloody and matted, and it was difficult to tell where that wound started or finished. I did not see any cerebellum.”94 Dr. Baxter agrees that it was difficult to determine the precise location of the wound when treating the President: “He had such a bushy head of hair, and blood and all in it, you couldn’t tell what was wound versus dried blood or dangling tissue. I have been misquoted enough on this, some saying I claimed the whole back of his head was blown away. That’s just wrong. I never even saw the back of his head. The wound was on the right side, not the back.”95 Dr. Jones makes the same observation, saying he did not even know there was a head wound for several minutes, and then finally realized it was a “large side wound, with blood and tissue that extended toward the rear, from what you could tell of the mess that was there.”96 Dr. Giesecke agrees “that the occipital and parietal region are so close together it is possible to mistake one for the other.”97 The only Parkland doctors who still believe they saw a wound in the rear of the head, as well as seeing cerebellum, are Robert McClelland and Charles Crenshaw. “I saw a piece of cerebellum fall out on the stretcher,” says McClelland, who claims he was in the best position of any of the doctors to view the head wound.98 He drew a sketch in 1967 for Josiah Thompson’s book Six Seconds in Dallas, which showed a gaping wound in the rear of the head.99 “I am astonished that Bob would say that,” says Dr. Malcolm Perry. “It shows such poor judgment, and usually he has such good judgment.”100 “I don’t think Bob McClelland was in the best place to see the head wound,” says Dr. Peters. “He wasn’t in that position the way I remember it, as he was on the other side of the table. As for Dr. McClelland saying he saw cerebellum fall out on the table, I never saw anything like that.”101 “Bob is an excellent surgeon,” says Dr. Jenkins. “He knows anatomy. I hate to say Bob is mistaken, but that is clearly not right. In 1988, when I went to the National Archives, the photos showed the President’s brain was crenelated from the trauma, and it resembled cerebellum, but it was not cerebellar tissue. I think it has thrown off a lot of people that saw it. I guess a last point is that Bob and Groden [co-author of High Treason] are such good friends, I believe it has changed his attitude.”102 “McClelland may be a fine surgeon, but he is a lousy pathologist,” says Baden. “I am sure he thinks he saw that, and has developed it in his mind. But his memory is just completely wrong, and the autopsy photos and X rays prove that.”103* Dr. Crenshaw wrote a book in 1992 in which he claimed he examined the wound, that the hole was in the rear of the head, and that the cerebellum was lacerated.104† Crenshaw, a junior resident at the time, arrived late at trauma room one and assisted for only a few minutes near the end. He was in no position to make the judgments he sensationally proclaimed in his book. In fact, his role was so minor that most of the other doctors do not even remember him. “I don’t remember Dr. Crenshaw in the room,” says Dr. Ron Jones. “I don’t remember him in there at any time, but he may have been,” recalls Dr. Jenkins. “Neither do I,” says Dr. Baxter. “I feel sorry for him,” says Dr. Perry. “I had thought about suing him, but when I saw him on television [promoting his book], my anger melted. He has to know that what he said is false, and he knows the rest of us know that. You have to pity him. What a way to end his career. His story is filled with half-truths and insinuations, and those of us who know him know he is desperate.… He is a pitiful sight.” A senior Dallas doctor who is a close Crenshaw friend told the author, “I think it is a bag of worms of ego, going over the hill, the last hurrah.” While almost all the Parkland doctors who treated JFK support the findings of the autopsy team, their confirmation may not be as important as the studies conducted by subsequent panels of experts. The Clark and Rockefeller commissions, as well as the House Select Committee’s medical panel, affirm the original autopsy conclusions about JFK’s head wound. The most detailed work was done by the Select Committee. All nine forensic pathologists agreed that the beveling of the skull and the damage to the brain meant the small rear hole in the President’s head was an entrance wound.105 The exit hole was consistent with a wound caused by the two large bullet fragments found in the front of the President’s car.106* SOURCE NOTES 83. Interview with Dr. Pepper Jenkins, March 10, 1992. 84. Interview with Dr. Charles Carrico, March 8, 1992. 85. Interview with Dr. Adolph Giesecke, March 5, 1992. 86. Interview with Dr. Malcolm Perry, April 2, 1992. 87. Interview with Dr. Charles Baxter, March 12, 1992. 88. Interview with Dr. Ron Jones, April 14, 1992. 89. Interviews with Dr. Michael Baden, February 1, 1992, and November 7, 1992. 90. Groden and Livingstone, op. cit., p. 46. 91. Interview with Dr. Charles Carrico, March 8, 1992. 92. Interview with Dr. Adolph Giesecke, March 5, 1992. 93. Interview with Dr. Pepper Jenkins, March 3, 1992. 94. Interview with Dr. Malcolm Perry, April 2, 1992. 95. Interview with Dr. Charles Baxter, March 12, 1992. 96. Interview with Dr. Ron Jones, April 14, 1992. 97. Interview with Dr. Adolph Giesecke, March 5, 1992. 98. Interview with Dr. Robert McClelland, March 9, 1992. 99. Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 140. 100. Interview with Dr. Malcolm Perry, April 2, 1992. 101. Interview with Dr. Paul Peters, March 10, 1992; Dr. Peters also drew a diagram that showed the doctors’ positions around the table and provided it to the author. 102. Interview with Dr. Pepper Jenkins, March 10, 1992. 103. Interview with Dr. Michael Baden, February 1, 1992. 104. Charles Crenshaw, op. cit., p. 88. 105. HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 110, 115. 106. Ibid., p. 128. AND the Footnotes to that section *Although no one at Parkland saw JFK’s back wound, Dr. Pepper Jenkins later told Dr. John Lattimer that he had felt it with his finger when he positioned the President’s head and neck to facilitate the passage of oxygen (Kennedy and Lincoln, p. 153). * After the autopsy, Humes and Boswell wrote their report from memory, without the benefit of the photographs or X rays. Robert Kennedy, who feared the public display of the X rays and photos would be offensive to the Kennedy family, reached an agreement with the Warren Commission not to publish the materials, and except for Earl Warren, the commissioners did not examine them. When the film was turned over to the custody of the National Archives in 1966, a metal box containing the President’s brain was missing from the inventory, together with some tissue slides. Humes had given everything from the autopsy, including the brain, to JFK’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley. “He told me,” said Humes, “that the [Kennedy] family wanted to inter the brain with the President’s body” (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 27, 1992, Vol. 267, No. 20, p. 2803). The House Select Committee concluded that Robert Kennedy likely disposed of the material for fear it would become a lurid public exhibition (HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 367–68). * In 1988, four of the Parkland doctors—Pepper Jenkins, Richard Dulaney, Paul Peters, and Robert McClelland—went to the National Archives at the invitation of a PBS documentary show, Nova, about the assassination. They were the first Parkland physicians to see the autopsy photographs, and each confirmed the photos represented what they remembered seeing that day, including a picture of the rear of President Kennedy’s head, which shows no defect. It has been suggested that the reason the photo shows the rear of the President’s head as undamaged is because the doctor (whose fingers are present in the picture) is holding a large flap of skin to cover the rear defect. “False,” says Dr. Michael Baden. “There is no flap of skin there. There is a bony protrusion from the right side of the head, but the rear is undamaged, except for the entry hole near the top of the skull” (Interview, January 23, 1992). * High Treason asserts that Jenkins originally said JFK was shot in the chest. Jenkins laughed when the author read him the Groden and Livingstone charge. “I don’t know where they get this stuff from. We put tubes into the President’s chest, but there were no chest wounds caused by anything else.” * In his original report, McClelland said there was a wound to the left temple, one that does not show up on any autopsy X ray or photograph. This has caused some to charge that Kennedy was shot by a second gunman from another location at Dealey, and that the autopsy team either negligently or intentionally overlooked that wound. “I’ll tell you how that happened,” Dr. Jenkins explained to the author. “When Bob McClelland came into the room, he asked me, ‘Where are his wounds?’ And at that time I was operating a breathing bag with my right hand, and was trying to take the President’s temporal pulse, and I had my finger on his left temple. Bob thought I pointed to the left temple as the wound.” † Crenshaw also said the autopsy photograph of the tracheotomy opening on Kennedy’s neck shows that it was larger than it had been at Parkland, implying that additional surgery might have been done between Parkland and Bethesda. “That’s ridiculous,” Dr. Malcolm Perry told the author. “I did the procedure. Tracheotomies are not pretty things, as speed is of the essence. Tissue can sag and stretch after death, but the photos I have seen look like the opening I remember making.” * While the Select Committee’s forensic panel agreed that a bullet had entered from the rear and exploded out the side of the President’s head, there was a lone dissent. Dr. Cyril Wecht said that such a finding did not preclude a shot also entering from the front. Dr. Wecht believed that the large exit wound on the right side “could hide an entrance wound at the same spot.” In other words, just as Oswald fired from behind and his bullet exited the President’s head, a front shooter fired into the wound created by the rear bullet. That is Wecht’s way of explaining why there is not another entry hole on JFK’s head. However, the X rays and photographs show no exit for a front bullet. The author raised the issue with Wecht, and he admitted that “the question of where did a front bullet exit is a very good one.” He first suggested that the front shot may have been a frangible bullet, which would have exploded upon impact in the brain. However, the X rays do not show any metal fragments in the brain from such a bullet, and when this was pointed out to Wecht, he acknowledged, “Yes, that’s true, there should be more fragments.” Finally, he suggested that the front bullet may have been plastic, and penetrated the brain but did not exit. He argued that since the brain is not available for examination, his speculation is possible—except that plastic bullets were rarely available until 1968, five years after the assassination. * The author viewed a video taken of the execution of a journalist by army troops in Central America. When the victim, who was lying flat on his stomach on the ground, was shot in the rear of the head, his upper torso and legs arched off the ground, in the opposite direction of the bullet. It was similar to the neuromuscular reaction JFK suffered. Also, when Governor Connally was struck in the rear shoulder by a bullet, he did not fall forward, but is clearly visible on the Zapruder film, his wounded shoulder pushing back into the car seat, toward the direction from which he was shot.

Gerald Posner

18,994 views • 1 year ago

This video is propaganda. It functioned to keep Sargon in beer money, and the population of the UK in denial about race. Like all good lies, it contains elements of truth, of which Sargon supplies massive helpings - far more than most propagandists ever dare - but it's effective... The first two minutes and 32 seconds are all true, by which time your brain trusts him, and you see him as being on your side as a White native Englishman. Of course right from the start he picks the easiest of targets (put a box of cornflakes next to a Guardian journalist and it will look like a patriot). And then (at 2:33) you get: "...but luckily for everyone else, being English is not just about being a race...". He continues: "...it's a particular way of viewing the world much as anything else", "...saying that I as an individual matter; every human matters". Of course Carl is not in any way wrong to identify and celebrate various English cultural artefacts as English, nor is he wrong to identify them as cultural, but the trick being done is to cut away their moorings from the DNA of the people who created them. You don't see him doing it, but he's in the water, scuba-diving down with a knife between his teeth, towards the tethers... ...And sure enough, at 5:19, in a mocking sneering smug tone: "But anyway Maya, let's get back to 'racial politics'. Let's not talk about values or ideas or ideals, or things that actually make the world a better place: let's get back to your fucking racial politics" (building to an angry exasperated tone). And suddenly there we are. 😐 The culture in which we were all being encouraged to take pride and admire now floats entirely free of its genetic substrate. Racial politics is bad, and associated in your brain with Guardian journalists. This - our - culture which the bodies and brains of our ancestors built, is now some sort of magic pink sparkly cloud hovering just above the ground, into which Indians and Africans can walk serenely and thereby be sort of transformed into us, nearly, just so long as it's done at a slow responsible pace. At 5:54 Sargon continues his imaginary conversation with Maya of The Guardian, adopting a super-confident and mildly exasperated lecturing tone (his favourite mode of address, obviously), and says: "But Maya, immigrants are not just a race; there are many hundreds of thousands of immigrants from France, and if you go to London, to an area which is predominantly populated by French people, it would not be sensible to say 'well this is an English area of London', is it, and yet that's nothing to do with their race, because they, like you will obviously point out, are White...". Well hang on Carl, yes, they are all White, and so maybe the thing making it (as you say) "not-sensible" to say they should not be in London doesn't become non-racial. Looks like you just talked yourself there in an illogical way. They are all White. Maybe this matters. Perhaps if we instead consider the prospect of adding the same number (many hundreds of thousands) of subsaharan Africans to London rather than Frenchmen, now it would be very sensible indeed to say they should not be there, whence the sensible - racial - criterion is plain to see. A full essay on the evolution of human nature in geographically isolated regions and the neurodiversity which emerged from that is beyond the scope of this tweet, but suffice to say White culture is what you get from White people, and African culture is what you get from African people. Europeans are White, and the relative closeness among European countries and cultures (compared to subsaharan Africans) by most metrics you might care about is not a coincidence, since heritable biological traits actually exist and actually matter, and they are not distributed evenly between different racial groups (see Fst distance), ergo race matters. Carl is a master of tugging at heartstrings, talking about these "past generations of blacks" who "admired English culture", and "wanted to be like us" etc.. Yes, no doubt many such individuals existed. They were always exceptional though, and we know they were exceptional, because if they weren't then Africa today would basically be similar to Yorkshire, just with nicer weather. And the problem for Carl is that Africa is obviously not like that, nor does any population of blacks anywhere in the world behave as a group like Europeans. I don't care particularly about John Cleese or what he says or where he goes, so the rest of the video is not terribly interesting, but just note at 6:48 Carl talks in approving terms of how "a small number of immigrants is OK", but "an overwhelming flood is pushing that principle too far". The problem with that is the number of non-Whites already in Britain was crazy-high in 2019 when Carl made this video, and our children were already well on track to becoming minorities in British schools without adding a single immigrant, even back then. Horrible racial conflict has been rife across the capital at least since the 90s, and it would be delusional to see the 1981 Brixton riots as anything but racial, ...and all this, and every sort of demographic vandalism besides, has come to pass PURELY because people who had advocated for racial politics in the 60s and 70s were successfully demonised by the media, just as Carl is doing in this video. The obvious foolishness of large numbers is like the obvious danger of lots of gunpowder compared to a small amount of gunpowder. It's not like the conflict magically goes away when the numbers are small. You just get White people lying to themselves and pushing discomfort down into their subconsciousness, and non-Whites sometimes (but by no means always) playing the game at first till their numbers become large enough. Pakistanis understood that cultural attitudes to child rape were different in our country, and so they assimilated by successfully hiding their child rape for about 20 or 30 years. Some White people even helped with that assimilation. The parts of our culture that Carl claims to want to promote (rule of law, freedom to criticise Islam, mutual respect, etc) is stuff that exists DESPITE the non-White population in the UK. It IS racial. And like of course it's racial. We are our DNA. Our culture was made by people, ...who were made by DNA. You can not make White people feel good - proudly talking up White culture - and then in the next breath sneer down your nose at those engaging in racial politics. It's a nasty (and given that Carl is not stupid, I have to suspect cynical) trick, the effect of which is to encourage a White audience to continue entertaining a suicidal and delusional belief in a tabula rasa model of human nature. His defenders will say "oh this is an old video, he's changed now...", and I am sure he is delighted that you believe so. Show me any example of him back-tracking on a single word of that though. I'll wait. I am writing this because I see what's happening to our population, and frankly anyone who isn't willing to recognise the need for racial politics is not your friend in this battle. If Carl has changed, then now would be a really great time to make that clear and come out on the side of Racial Nationalism. Anything else is just muddying the waters and enabling the stigmatisation of actual patriots. Look at where the UK is, and where it is going. Look at the pictures of schools with literally a single White face sitting among a sea of blacks. It's fucking insane, and it's obviously a racial issue that requires racial politics. At least we're talking about a rational lawful non-violent approach to sorting out who should be allowed to claim Englishness. We're having a conversation. Steve Laws, for example, is not a terrorist: he is a brave patriot giving a voice to the native population of a land which wants to recover that land. In reality English people are basically lovely. We're softies. The rest of the world knows that though. If we start to get a serious program of remigration off the ground, yes the reduction in sheer numbers of racial aliens will be welcome in itself, but black families that didn't produce criminal rugrats, and haven't spent the past 40 years moaning about how racist the English are will probably find that White communities rally round them, put in a good word for them, and achieve a consensus about not deporting them. What needs to happen is a basic shift in the narrative, and in the psychology: the assumption and understanding should be that citizenship is genetic, and that any exception to that is a polite and kind gesture from our people, which we have the full moral and legal right to withhold if we feel that we're being treated as suckers. And that's what I have to say about that. ...And of course Happy New Year to everyone in Australia!!! 🥳🎉🪩 -A.Frog '25/'26 🐸👍🏻

𝙰𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝙵𝚛𝚘𝚐

167,032 views • 7 months ago

‡ Might (the) Grass Ultimately Prove Greener? Golden Tempo, a two-year-old colt by Curlin, owned and bred by Phipps Stable & St. Elias Stables, LLC, recently won his debut in eye-catching style. It was a 6f. MSW race at the Fair Grounds, and he came from the clouds, as they say, to win going away. He earned a 78 Beyer figure, and a 12 on Ragozin sheets. The attached video clip begins roughly midway through the turn, with the announcer saying that "Golden Tempo has dropped back to last", but the colt actually raced at the back of the pack from just after the break. With only one race under his belt, it is a bit early to be making confident assumptions, particularly as he was both bred to be, and appears to be a later-developing physical type. But the challenge of using even scant available evidence to make projections can be both fun, and potentially useful. So let's dive in. *** Given the colt's pedigree and physical type, I would say that it would be safe to assume that he will prove better suited to longer races, though the question of whether or not he is likely to stay effectively beyond 9f. is very much open at this early stage. What interests me the most, though, are a couple of more nuanced, and possibly connected aspects of Golden Tempo's debut, and what they may imply when filtered through the lens of his pedigree and physical characteristics. First, does the fact that the colt rallied from last to win over 6f., a distance well short of those to which he is likely to prove better suited, necessarily imply that he is a "one-run" horse? Or will he, given more ground, and experience, prove capable of displaying good tactical speed? I would note that when inexperienced horses fail to break alertly, and/or take some time to get their feet under them after the break, some, like Golden Tempo, lag back for a few furlongs before mounting a late run, while others show some, if not a burst of speed, earlier in the running. I think it's fair to say that broadly speaking, the former are more likely to prove to be one-run types than the latter. While that is far from sufficient evidence to confidently assume that Golden Tempo will necessarily turn out to be a one-run horse, it does at least hint in that direction. Another, even more nuanced hint, is his action. When I first watched the replay of the race, my initial thought was that the colt was finishing like a typical one-run horse. What do I mean by that? The best way to explain it is to say that he appears, in a sense, to be pulling with his forelegs, more than pushing from behind. The distinction is subtle, so bear with me. Dirt surfaces are, albeit to differing degrees, "break-away" surfaces. Think of what it is like when you run on a beach over loose sand, as opposed to concrete, or a running track. Some horses handle dirt surfaces well, while others don't, and there are several variables that contribute to such preferences. Pedigree is, of course, a primary consideration, but often the more important variables are conformation, physical type, and action. In the U.S., dirt horses are often, though not always, more heavily muscled than those best suited to turf. I'd suggest that one of the more likely reasons is that speed is such an important quality in American dirt racing, and muscular horses, especially through the hind-quarters, are typically able to accelerate more quickly. It may also be the case that strong propulsion from behind helps horses to, in a sense, power through looser surfaces. There are exceptions, of course, and plenty of them. Fierceness, to use a recent example, had a very high cruising speed, yet was not heavily muscled, nor did he have a powerful looking hind end. But every aspect of the game features exceptions, and they help to define, rather than diminish the value of pattern recognition. Beyond the "pulling" action that I mentioned above, I found the embedded photo posted by his trainer to be interesting as well. While it's not an ideal conformation shot, he does give the impression of a leggy, later-developing type, and not yet fully "furnished", despite being an early February foal. He also gives me the impression, both overall and in terms of foreleg conformation, of a horse that would likely be suited to turf racing. Now, needless to say, due to typical preferences and the incentives found in American racing, there is little, if any chance of Golden Tempo ever racing on turf, as long as he continues to perform well on dirt. But setting that aside, I dug into his pedigree in an effort to see if there were any further hints to be found. Superficially, it's easy to see why most would assume that the colt was bred to be a dirt horse. After all, his sire, Curlin, and dam-sire, Bernardini, were both dirt performers, and are best known as sires of dirt horses. His dam, Carrumba, also performed well on dirt. However, on closer inspection, I wouldn't be so confident in that thumbnail reading. Consider that Golden Tempo does not closely resemble Curlin, in part in terms of coat color. And while many would consider that to be of little importance, I would disagree, based on long experience. What I mean is that I have often found value in connecting the appearance of horses which don't closely resemble their own sires, with other genetic influences that are not too distant. And in this case, I would say that Golden Tempo reminds me more of Curlin's sire, Smart Strike, and some of his offspring. Though he only raced on dirt himself, Smart Strike got plenty of good turf horses (e.g. Champion English Channel) through a successful career at stud. As for Golden Tempo's dam, Carrumba, she has thus far produced one other foal to race, Hype House, a filly which failed to place in three starts. She was trained by Shug McGaughey, and, interestingly, all three of her starts were on turf. His second-dam, Castanet, was by El Prado (Ire). Though a versatile sire, El Prado produced top turf horses such as Artie Schiller and Kitten's Joy. Castanet was also trained by Shug McGaughey, and she only started twice. The first race was on dirt, and the second on turf, in which she placed third. Castanet produced Dancing All Night, a filly also trained by Shug McGaughey, which began her career with a number promising dirt races, before appearing to plateau, and being switched to the turf for her final two starts. That she was unplaced in both (the latter was taken off the turf) is not nearly as important, to my mind, as why Shug might have chosen to make the surface switch. Golden Tempo's third-dam, Dancinginmydreams, produced the Gr. I turf winner Dancing Forever, and several other good turf runners. So, while I wouldn't say that Golden Tempo's bottom-line screams turf, it has been more than versatile enough to consider the possibility, given other hints, or encouragements. *** Finally, there is a good chance that this analysis will ultimately prove to be purely academic, and I'd be perfectly happy to see Golden Tempo thrive on dirt, and perhaps develop into a serious KY Derby prospect. But if, by chance, he were to plateau at some point, or for any other reason be given an opportunity to try the turf, I have a fairly strong suspicion that he would adapt very well, and reward the colt's connections.

Tinky

12,243 views • 7 months ago

💥 LAP Alert 💥 "I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed." ~Knapp Is Lacatski Lying to Us About the Craft and Breaching the Hull? ~ "If not for that [2017 NYT] story about AATIP and the problems that [Lacatski] saw with it, he would never have mentioned [AAWSAP]...I don't think, ever." ~Knapp (So, in other words...thank you from the UFO community, to the NYT, for getting it wrong? 🙂) ~ Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell: "Should we listen to Dr. James Lacatski on UFOs, on the fact, or the idea, that our government has at least one, he's admitted, and we breached the hull? Should we listen to him, George?" George Knapp: "I know a lot of people have noticed that he's talked about his role in counterintelligence as part of the AAWSAP program. And because they equate counterintelligence with lies, false info., cover stories, misdirection. Aha! He's putting out a bunch of false info. a decade after he retired from government service." (I saw one person suggest that, and I thought it was a questionable take...) Grant Lavac: "Given that Dr. James Lacatski was the 'counterintelligence coordinator' for AAWSAP, how much confidence can we invest in the veracity of his public statements that 'at least one recovered craft of unknown origin, a flying machine with no wings, no engine, no fuel, and no fuel tanks' is in the possession of the US government and that they had 'breached the hull' of the UFO? In the context of the counterintelligence value of UAP/UFO, his comments in this most recent interview on WEAPONIZED (edited for brevity) only raise more questions for me." ~~~ Knapp: "A, it's not [Lacatski]. He's not out there beating the bushes. He's talked to us, but that's pretty much it. He's telling the full story as much as he can in a series of books. And I was co-author on two of those, not on this one. And, you know, I remember the first time I met him, it was in 2018." ~ (In April of 2019, Knapp shared that story, minus Lacatski's name, at UFO MegaCon. Knapp in 2019: "I thought today I would share with you, sort of the informational foundation that I’ve acquired. So, one year ago, I made this trip to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of Senator Harry Reid. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2018 and I already knew a little bit about AATIP and AAWSAP and what they’ve been studying and where the money came from and how the program was created. I did this sort of spy thing where I changed hotel rooms and I changed taxis. I was making sure I wasn’t followed. And if there was ever actually, anybody following me, they must have thought I looked ridiculous because it was way over the top. "But I ended up having to meet with Senator Reid and some other people who were directly involved in these programs and they gave me a download. And I thought I knew a lot about these programs when I went there and realized that I only knew a little tiny bit. The purpose of this was to learn about these programs. We all know about AATIP, but in reality, there was something before that. "I sat down for a couple of hours with Senator Reid and other people whose names, they don’t want to be known. They brought me up to speed on how AATIP was created. How its predecessor was under way for a number of years. It coexisted for a long time. People in this room. People who investigate this topic may have suspected for a long time that there was some kind of a program that still existed. We’ve all heard that Project Bluebook was the end. 1969 it ended and the government was done with UFOs. They closed up shop. And the reason they closed it down is because there was no evidence that it involved national security. "And we all knew that was baloney because of the stories that we’ve seen that are really well documented. For example, UFOs over nuclear missile bases. UFO encounters with the military installations and atomic facilities. Things of that sort the have been well documented over the years. There are cases that involved national security. So at the end of Blue Book, of course, this memo said, alright, any cases involving national security will continue to be investigated in the regular way. Well, what the heck was the regular way? We didn’t know. Well now we do know. At least a little bit of it." (Project Blue Book was shut down in December of 1969, but a few months earlier, in October, we had the Bolender memo, which noted that "reports of UFOs which could affect national security should continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." What standard Air Force procedure? The regular way? Where did those cases go? We still don't know what Bolender was referring to in that memo.) ~ Knapp in 2019: "And one of the regular ways was this program called AATIP. So I went on this trip. [and] I learned this stuff about AATIP. I had known a lot about it before but I got this briefing about this alphabet soup of different programs, how they began and what they studied. December 2017, the New York Times breaks this story about AATIP. Now, I had known about it for a long time because I lived in Las Vegas. I knew Bob Bigelow. I knew Harry Reid. We’d talk about UFO stuff and what was going on. "So when I was told the New York Times was gonna break the story, I’m kind ticked off about it. Because hey, I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. Why don’t I get to break the story? And they had to, one after another, gently remind me, 'You know. You’re not the New York Times.' Which I had to admit! It was true. And if I had done the story, the Times had said that they weren’t going to do it if somebody else breaks it. So, if I had done it, it’d be another story from a UFO reporter. "The New York Times did it and they changed everything. Because they did it, wider organizations did it. Some of them took shots at the New York Times because The Times got the story and they didn’t. But that story was accurate, to a degree. But the story that it told was not the full story. AATIP, that we know about…the AATIP that studies nuts and bolts saucers…case of UFOs that have encounters with military units such as the USS Nimitz, that is studied by a group of people, Lue Elizondo was the head of it. "It’s not so much a program as it was a loose network of intelligence officials in different agencies, including the Air Force and the Navy, CIA, DIA, DARPA…there might be a couple of other agencies. But a case would come in from any one of their units [and] it would be shared with this group of people, analysis would be done, evidence would be looked at and then stashed in a draw and nobody ever sees it. It’s not passed up the chain of command. "In 2007, that changed. One of the guys (Lacatski. ~Joe 2025) I met with in this meeting in Washington is the one who changed it. He had been in the same position that Lue Elizondo had been in. And his name is just not out there. He grew frustrated with what was happening with the phenomenon and he suspected that UFOs flying around the sky, buzzing our military units every once in a while, is not the full story. Even if you could solve that part of the mystery it wouldn’t solve the bigger part of the picture. "So he grew interested in Skinwalker Ranch and he had read the (Knapp/Kelleher – 'Hunt For The Skinwalker') book. And after he read it, he called up Bob Bigelow and said…actually, he wrote him a letter and said, 'Hey, can I go to the ranch…go look around? I’m with the DIA.' Bigelow says, 'Come on out to Las Vegas and I’ll take you there.' And that’s what happened. He flew to Las Vegas. They flew on Bigelow’s jet. They went to the ranch. "This guy’s not there fifteen minutes and he has an experience. And I’m not gonna go into detail. I’m hoping that he’s going to maybe come forward at some point and describe his experience. But it was just for him. Of all the people in this room, in the encounter, he was the only one who could see it. He’s the only one who had an angle on this thing that appeared. And he’s pretending that he’s not seeing it but it’s right out of the corner of his eye. And he doesn’t say anything until he leaves the ranch. And he gets off and he asks Bigelow if he had seen it. And he had not. The other people who had been in the room had not seen it. "He flies back to Las Vegas, goes back to Washington, D.C. and looks up Harry Reid and tells him about it. Now Reid had some experience in these matters that I’ll get into in a little bit. But as a result of that conversation, Reid, who had an interest in UFOs and had maintained that interest over many years – and I can attest to that personally – called in a couple of his friends in the Senate – Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens. They had a conversation in a secure room and they decided to provide some funding for a much broader study. Something that looked at…beyond flying saucers, that looked at other paranormal aspects…supernatural aspects that we would not normally associate with aliens or ETs. Assuming that that’s what this is, which I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. And that is how AAWSAP was born. The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program." ~~~ Knapp Yesterday: "The only reason [Lacatski] came forward, he was ticked off about how AATIP had been described in major media reports, and no mention had been given to the actual, real program. That one that had a $22 million budget, lasted 27 months, and which put together the biggest UFO data warehouse in history, that had written all these papers that still have not been released." (In the most-recent interview (Part 1) with Weaponized, Lacatski let it fly with his issues related to the 2017 NYT article: "The initial reporting...by the New York Times story in 2017 was totally inaccurate. Contrary to what some people claim, the authors knew my name and position at AAWSAP, yet never attempted to contact me. Likewise, the The Washington Post. POLITICO (laughs) contacted me within hours after the articles were published in the free publications, asking for my opinion. They knew my name, they had my phone number. Why didn't they contact me [beforehand]?" ~Dr. James Lacatski on Weaponized ~ Knapp: "So, Jim was a counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, but in this role. He wasn't putting out cover stories or lies, he didn't put out anything. The world didn't hear that AAWSAP existed until years later, at least by that name. There was one statement made to the press about that program. It was by Robert Bigelow, whose company, BAASS, got the contract. A week after he signed it, he came on with me on Coast to Coast AM and said, 'We got this program dealing with UFOs, we have an unnamed partner, and we're excited to get going.' That was it. "Jim Lacatski wasn't putting out PR releases about AAWSAP. There was nothing. That was the last thing anybody said until the New York Times did the AATIP story, and then Jim Lacatski felt the real story was being covered up. If not for that story about AATIP and the problems that he saw with it, he would never have mentioned this. I don't think ever." (Well, then, thank you to the NYT journalists and editors for pissing off Lacatski!) Knapp: "You'll recall, AAWSAP, at the time that things went downhill, that the funding was moved away, they were trying to make it into a SAP, a Special Access Program. And if it had happened, we probably would never have heard of it. If it had happened, Lue Elizondo would have been the counterintelligence guy for AAWSAP, that he had already talked to Lacatski. "But Lacatski is not proclaiming the greatness of the program. He's not out there beating the bushes on podcasts and newscasts, other than with us, and he never put out in counterintelligence. His role, counterintelligence, meant something different for AAWSAP. The thing that DIA had told him was, 'Look, you know, it's not a rogue program. I know it gets weird into some of the phenomena that was at Skinwalker Ranch and other places. We don't care. Here's what we care about: Don't let the secret out. We don't want to see this on the front page of the Washington Post. We want it kept secret.' (John Greenewald was one person questioning whether AAWSAP was actually a prosaic program and Lacatski just decided to go rogue with a foray into UFOs and the paranormal.) Greenewald Tweet: "Did the U.S. government really sanction this, and if so, is this really how it was run? Or was this a rogue operation by a select few on the inside playing with Uncle Sam's coffers?" (Greenewald was quote tweeting a Greenstreet hit-piece video on AAWSAP. In his interview on Weaponized aired over the past few weeks, Lacatski said that former Deputy Director of AARO, Tim Phillips, also used the "rogue" word when describing AAWSAP. Did DIA really not know what AAWSAP was about? Did Lacatski go rogue and turn a program that was supposed to look at prosaic, advanced technology into one that studied UFOs and the paranormal? Here's an exchange from the 2023 interview Knapp and Corbell did with Lacatski and Colm Kelleher.) Kelleher: "The critical part of AAWSAP that we tried to convey in 'Skinwalkers at the Pentagon,' was that there were two fundamental, parallel tracks that AAWSAP ran on. The first one was the examination of UFO performance. And, you know, the UFO performance part was getting all of the data from eyewitnesses, plus deploying sensors into the field, in order to gather data on the performance of UFOs. That was track number one. And track number two was: What effects do UFOs have on humans? That was a parallel track that, from the get go, AAWSAP decided, unambiguously, to run both tracks in parallel. We documented psychological effects, and then we also documented paranormal effects." Lacatski: "Anything can be said on the internet it seems, factual or not. Well, one thing that is not factual is, DIA knew what it was getting into in regard to both aspects that Colm just described to you. And let me end my statement right here. We had no choice but to pursue both aspects." (That was a poor way of him saying: The claim that DIA was unaware of AAWSAP looking into all aspects of UFOs, including the paranormal, is NOT true.) Lacatski: "I want to emphasize something I said on my first and only interview. It was a closed program. It operated very similar to a SAP. The director, the director of analysis, and my office chief...and, of course, division chief, knew about this program. No one else did. Now, I was also protected by the stovepipe nature of that. I did not have to address political-type questions. I was insulated, but they were, too. There was no one else. People in the surrounding cubicles didn't know. Nothing was purposely being hid. It was a closed, stovepipe system, and it needed to be. It needed to be operated that way." ~~~ Knapp: "And so, Jim Lacatski took it on himself, put it in his own hands. He and Colm Kelleher interviewed all these people who applied for the jobs, the 50 full-time positions that they staffed, in a matter of months. They did background checks, they required security clearances for all those people, and they were worried about leaks. They didn't want information to get out. "They also were concerned about espionage by foreign players, by foreign companies, things of that sort. And some of that really did happen. As Jim has shared with us, there were a couple of phones that were transmitters that were found inside Bigelow Aerospace, inside the Bigelow, uh, facilities, and it was very alarming because they weren't sure who was doing it. I think they think it was a foreign government. I'm not going to say which one, uh, they suspected the most." (Lacatski said that the phones in question were made in China.) Knapp: "But, and then they also found weird frequencies emanating from Skinwalker Ranch. That's not strange, and there's a lot of unusual stuff that happens there, but it was some sort of a an espionage program that they believed was was not only looking at the ranch, but also at BAASS. "That was his primary concern. He was worried that the story gets out, because secrecy was of paramount interest to the heads of DIA and he's worried about the information getting out to the public. Because once it happened, then the knives come out in the Pentagon and within the intelligence community, which is kind of what happened. A memo was sent from Harry Reid's office, let other people know that AAWSAP existed, and that's when things started getting problematic." Corbell: "The bugging thing. So, it's not just like Bigelow Aerospace was tapped with something, he said, specifically, AAWSAP, right? So they were looking at that new UFO program. And I don't know how public this is, but he did say it was - not just him, other people have all said - it was multiple nations, multiple, different devices from those phones. And he also said that they worked with FBI, they had FBI liaisons looking at the ranch property, and also at Bigelow Aerospace. "Because, remember, they were supposed to receive a transfer of materials. That's why they reverse, reverse engineered (laughs), you know, they built everything to be able to hold SCIF-capable and material-capable property at that classification level. So, look, I think if we pull it back, the whole idea is, James Lacatski made a statement at some point that he was, you know, head of, or part of, or running the counterintelligence for AAWSAP. But his point was to keep AAWSAP itself secret from foreign nations. So then he has to keep it secret from the U.S. He did it. He did a great job. They actually kept it secret. That doesn't mean he's going out and creating false information to the public like he's been accused of. "So, should we listen to Jim Lacatski? That was like, you know, the main question. Oh, one second. He also identified that there is currently a counter-programming, counterintelligence operation going on to the American public, but not against the American public, by AARO." (In other words, spread misinformation to the American public so they can advance their goal of misinforming and confusing our adversaries who are always listening. National security! IMO, that's only acceptable if we're talking specifics related to propulsion, technology and weapons that can be used to give us a leg up on said adversaries. But everything else should come out and be made public. We shouldn't be told a bunch of lies about information we paid for and that could, potentially, give us some clarity about our species and other lifeforms on this planet.) Corbell: That was so clear in our interview with him that he said that, you know, 'Look, they're acting this way. They are telling you lies about AAWSAP and what happened.' And that's why he said, 'My books, I'm a government employee. This was paid by taxpayers. I'm trying to give you information.' And that's what his books are. "So it's clear from these rounds of interviews that we just had with Dr. Lacatski that he supports a controlled UFO disclosure. He made that very clear. So should we listen to what he has to say? I mean, he was a big dog, right, George?" Knapp: "He was the head of the largest U.S. government-funded UFO investigation in history, that we know of. He worked with Colm Kelleher, who was the boots-on-the-ground guy in Las Vegas. He worked with Jay Stratton. Stratton's role in the development of AAWSAP has not been really fully explored, but he's got a book coming out at some point, once it gets through the DOPSR process. But then we'll get additional information to buttress what Lacatski has said."

Joe Murgia

56,558 views • 8 months ago

Dear David Coltart, WHY I CANNOT SUPPORT QUINTUPLE C: COLTART, CHAMISA AND CCC My attention has been drawn to your fraudulent and disgusting tweet you posted on my Twitter TL yesterday David, in which you quoted a tweet I posted four years ago on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father. I reproduce below both tweets for ease of reference: “I have always genuinely sympathized with you Jonathan - the loss of your father in such circumstances must be devastating. I just don’t understand why you continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your family, and which still brings so much suffering.” – Tweet by David Coltart, 30 July 2023; commenting on my tweet below I posted four years ago: “1/5 On 22 January 1983 my father, Melusi Job Mlevu, was callously murdered in Tsholotsho by gukurahundi soldiers & the CIO. They tortured him upon his arrest & in front of his family; got him to dig a shallow grave, tortured him again; pumped bullets into his body & buried him!” – Jonathan Moyo tweet posted on 22 January 2019. Now David, are you really serious that you “have always genuinely sympathised with me”, because of “the loss of [my] father in such circumstances”? And since there’s no strategic ambiguity about the meaning of “always”, as it means exactly what it says, how have you “always genuinely” expressed your sympathy over all the years, since knowing about the circumstances under which I lost my father? The fact that your tweet yesterday is a response to a tweet I posted a long four years ago on 22 January 2019 – in memory of my father who was murdered by the Fifth Brigade in Tsholotsho on 22 January 1983 – shows and proves that you’re a fraud and a charlatan with neither sensitivity towards me and my family nor respect for us as Africans and human beings. All told, and typically of Zimbabweans of British colonial extraction and in particular of soul-free Rhodies, you’re contemptuous of our culture as a family and as Africans. You see David, it is fraudulent and utterly disgusting of you to claim that you have ever sympathised with me over my father’s loss. It’s actually patronising and very insulting in the extreme. Your fraud is clear even to yourself, that’s why you did not express your so-called sympathy when I first posted my tweet on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father who was murdered on 22 January 1983. In fact, until your fraudulent tweet yesterday, you had never before expressed any genuine or even non genuine sympathy for me and my family regarding the loss of my father on 22 January 1983. Even fools will immediately see that the key sentence in your tweet yesterday is not about your cruel declaration of fraudulent sympathy for me and my family over the circumstances of my father’s loss, a loss my family commemorated this year not yesterday but seven months ago on 22 January 2023, with no tweet of sympathy from you. The sentence in your tweet yesterday that captures what you really foolishly communicating to me is this: “I just don’t understand why you continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your family, and which still brings so much suffering.” David: what I say, believe and do is without exception based on and an existential product of what I know, what I think and what I have experienced or lived. I never say, believe or do anything that I don’t know, don’t, I have not thought of or which I don’t believe. Now David, you pretend to be a democrat who believes in the rule of law as enshrined in the Constitution, so, what business of yours is my choice of what side to support or to not support in politics? Are my freedom of conscience and my right to make political choices freely now subject to your understanding, or are they my constitutional rights, as they are for every Zimbabwean, in terms of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe? Are you aware David and do you understand that the Constitution in 67(1)(b) says every Zimbabwean citizen has the right “to make political choices freely”? And, David, are you aware that section 60 of the Constitution says every person, not just every Zimbabwean but every person, has the right to freedom of conscience which includes “freedom of thought, opinion, religion or belief”, and “freedom to practice and propagate and give expression to their thought, opinion, religion or belief, whether in public or in private and whether alone or together with others”. The fact that you quoted and abused my personal tweet I posted on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father who was brutally murdered by the Fifth Brigade on 22 January 1983 to say you “don’t understand why you [me] continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your [my] family, and which still brings so much suffering”; shows that you are either ignorant of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, and proves that you are a fraud and a charlatan with no constitutional values. Why do you want to police my freedom of conscience and my right to make my political choices freely? Just why do you and your lot in CCC, think that you can interfere with my freedom of conscience and my right to my political choices that are guaranteed to me by the Constitution of Zimbabwe? If you and your lot were genuine democratic change champions, as you claim and purport to be, you would be the first to understand and to propagate freedom of conscience and the right to make political choices freely as sacrosanct constitutional values and principles that must be respected for every Zimbabwean at all times. But this has not been possible because you are frauds and charlatans. Now, your attitude towards me, the one captured in the disgusting tweet you posted yesterday, leads me to conclude without any fear of being contradicted that you are a frivolous and stupid person, David. Otherwise, if you care to know, there are three months that are cruel to me. October in which I lost my daughter Zanele in 2015, November because of what happened to me, my family and some colleagues during the 2017 military coup – it was also on 11 November 1965 that Rhodesia under which you blossomed, unilaterally declared independence – and 22 January the dark day on which my father was murdered. These are traumatic days for me in the calendar year. You see, I was a student in California in the US when my father was murdered by the Fifth Brigade in cold blood on 22 January 1983, having gone to the US before independence in 1977. When this awful tragedy happened, I did not know who my father was. I was born when my mother was barely 16 years old, and I was raised by my maternal grandparents who, like my mother, did not want me to know who my father was for reasons best known to them. Although, as I grew up, I understood their position from our cultural perspective as Africans, it nevertheless profoundly pained me. Truth be told, I was most grateful and I still am to this day, that my grandfather was a great father and my grandmother a great mother to me in ways that made me who I am today. I got to know who my father was well after I had graduated with my doctorate in 1988 and long after his gruesome murder, about which I was first told only 10 years ago. Since then, while it's been a profound rebirth for me to connect with my father through the loving Mlevu clan at large, I owe my dear sister Simiso an existential debt of gratitude. Through her, my kids have a hand-holder gateway through which to know about their grandfather. I really thank God and the spirit of the Mlevu clan for Simiso. The fact that I was born on 12 January, and that my father was brutally murdered on 22 January, makes the month of January an unbearable time of anguish for me, more so given that my father and I never met in life. When four years ago on 22 January 2019 I posted the tweet that you abused yesterday with reckless abandon, as you exposed your disconnection from the African experience, I was existentially troubled by the worst that could have happened to me and to my family on 15 November 2017, which got me thinking about what happened to my father, and even more troubling against the backdrop of the events of November 2017, I was devastated by the fact that I never met my father, and I spent the better part of 22 January 2019 wondering what life could have been for me had I known him in life and grown up under his parental care and guidance. You see David, maybe this is not true of people of European ancestry like you but, for many Africans it is very common for kids to be raised by their grandparents, like I was. As things turned out, I grew up knowing many such kids as my peers, the majority of whom never got to know who fathered them, some of whom are leading very successful lives in society as you read this. Unlike them, I was fortunate to end up knowing who my father was, but I was unfortunate not to have met him, and even more unfortunate to have known of him long after his death, made worse by the tragic circumstances of that death. I do not have a fly by night connection with Zanu PF. When I finished my high school in California, I proceeded to university there for my undergraduate education on a scholarship I got through Zanu PF. While an undergraduate, I was the political commissar of the Zanu PF branch in Los Angeles. I did my masters and doctoral degrees with academic scholarships endorsed by Zanu PF and underwritten by the Government of Zimbabwe through a staff development programme at the University of Zimbabwe. Having gone through Mgagao run by Zanu PF, and having gotten university education to the highest level under the auspices of Zanu PF, I have a long history and experience with Zanu PF, and with Zanu PF people whose complexities define who I am as an adult Zimbabwean, for better or for worse. It's my history, I'm proud of it and I own it. It’s an inescapable truth that each individual, and each therefore each person has a unique existential history best known to himself or herself, family and to a small cohort that has been intimate parts of that personal history. It's hopelessly foolish for someone to hope to prescribe a history on anyone. Every human being is who they are. And it's a fact not exclusive to me that my association with Zanu PF has not always been rosy. Life is a personal struggle between the person or the individual and the social formations through which life goes on. It’s common cause, that the military coup was a traumatic experience for me and my family and that it was profoundly painful and life changing in untold ways. It’s also common cause and not surprising to any normal human being that I blamed Zanu PF for that traumatic experience. Anyone else in my situation would have done the same at point or another. Yet the bigger story is that I, my family and my colleagues survived that 2017 ordeal with the very direct, active and truly genuine assistance and support from Zanu PF people. Working with other African Angeles, and I emphasize African Angeles, it was Zanu PF people who made sure that we were able to be safe and to get out of the country to be where I am today, all of them at great risk to their lives or livelihoods. In 2017 I was saved to be alive today by Zanu PF people. During the life threatening 2017 ordeal that my family and I went through, there was not even one person associated with the opposition as it was then, or as it is today, who reached out to find out where I was or how I was doing. It is common cause, some of it is documented, that many in the opposition then and who are still in opposition today, actually wanted me dead, all because of my political differences with them. You David Coltart, who now wants to pretend that you “have always genuinely sympathised with me”, never inquired after me. That’s why I think you are a monumental fraud and a charlatan. I repeat, I was helped out of the traumatic ordeal in 2017 by Zanu PF people, not by anyone from your lot David, not even one. Of course, at some point and largely because of the 2018 general election I found myself connected with some of your lot, especially Nelson Chamisa and others who were close to him or working with him i the election campaign, as the MDC-A presidential election candidate. I will not rehash that story here, as it has been told very well by many others. From my experience, and the lessons I have extrapolated from the late Vice President Joshua Nkomo, such as on the attached video clip, I have come to better appreciate that it is a mistake and wrong to a understand and define a political party with a deep-seated background and history like Zanu PF in terms of its leadership; rather, a grounded political party with a long history is necessarily defined by its founding values, constitution and membership, not least because the membership is permanent while the leadership comes and goes. By the same token, I have come to better appreciate that the mistakes or excesses of the leadership of grounded political parties with an entrenched history should not automatically or reflexively be ascribed or attributed to or blamed on the membership. On 15 November 2022, Patrick Zhuwao and I wrote an open letter to Zanu PF members to precisely make this point. I am attaching herewith a link to that letter, lest you missed it. It’s a self-explanatory letter which contextualises and explains everything that I did and said between 15 November 2017 and 14 November 2022. It also explains why do not support Nelson Chamisa and your CCC. I stand by the contents of that letter. In this connection, I draw your attention and that of your lot to an interview done by the late VP Joshua Nkomo in 1983 – which is attached herewith as already mentioned – in which Nkomo explains why the Fifth Brigade was not a Shona issue. Although Nkomo made it clear that gukurahundi was a political and not a tribal issue, I have come to understand and appreciate that it was a political issue not in the sense of Zanu PF as a political party in membership terms but, rather, in the sense of the political leadership and, more particularly, of individuals within that leadership. However, given your utter contempt for sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, I do not expect you to understand the dangers of painting a tribe or a political party with one brush, or to understand the misguided consequences of conflating the leadership of a political party with the party’s membership or even of treating the leadership of a political party as a monolithic formation that always acts in concert. Basically David, and just like Nelson Chamisa’s trolls, it's clear you believe that you can abuse my personal and tragic circumstances to blackmail me for your doomed political purposes in two ways. First, you think you can abuse the circumstances of my father’s brutal death to somehow generate cheap and outrageous propaganda for yourself, Nelson Chamisa and CCC that I support Zanu PF which killed my father, and you do this under your self-indulgent presumption that everyone who is in Zanu PF as a political party is murderous by definition. Second, and based on this falsification, you’re abusing my tragic personal circumstances regarding my father’s loss to blackmail me into supporting you in particular, given my attack on your imposition as CCC's Ward 4 councillor candidate in Bulawayo; Nelson Chamisa and CCC . Your outrageous position is that if I cannot support you, I must keep quiet about you, under the ridiculous presumption that you’re all by definition virtuous, competent, capable, the only and best democratic alternative for everyone in Zimbabwe. On the back of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe and drawing from my knowledge, thoughts, experiences and received wisdom from the late VP Joshua Nkomo, I have dealt with your self-indulgent presumption that Zanu PF is a monolithic formation with undifferentiated leadership and membership structures, in which you take everyone in it to be murderous by definition. In light of the fact that you invited this intervention by your disgusting and intrusive tweet you posted yesterday, and because we are age mates, I conclude my rejoinder to your offensive tweet by telling you what I think about you, about Nelson Chamisa and about CCC. David, as a former member of the Rhodesian security services which were murderous and which committed unspeakable atrocities across Zimbabwe and beyond its borders into Zambia and Mozambique, you have no moral authority to pontificate about human rights or anything of the sort. You David Coltart operated in Matabeleland where you did dastardly things, some of which you narrate in your autobiography and many of which you will take to your grave untold, because you never faced a commission of inquiry to be grilled under oath about your service in the Rhodesian security services. The fact that a person like you has remained active in Zimbabwean public affairs for 43 years since independence is a huge credit to our national politics because, with your background in the Rhodesian security services, you would not have survived this long in public life elsewhere. It’s mind boggling that Chamisa has imposed you to run for Ward 4 councillor in Bulawayo, after you were resoundingly defeated in your party’s Ward 4 community candidate selection caucus in which you were clobbered and you came a distant last among the contestants. Thanks to your being power hungry, you have made it possible for everyone to see that you’re a fake democrat and a charlatan who believes in the imposition of candidates. Your criticism of what you say is Zanu PF's undemocratic practices is hollow and hypocritical. Furthermore, it’s shocking is that Chamisa is bent on imposing you from Harare as Bulawayo mayor. You don’t qualify for that position not least because you do not speak the language of the local community in Bulawayo despite having been born there 66 years ago. Unlike Members of Parliament or Senators, whose chambers conduct their business mainly in English, Councillors and Mayors work in the local languages of their local communities. For the above reasons, and as an expression of my freedom of conscience and my right to make my political choices freely, I do not and cannot support you at all David. As for Chamisa, having worked closely with him between 2018 and 2021, I came to the settled conclusion in November 2021 that he is a dictator with a very dangerous God complex, in that he sees himself as having been chosen by God to lead Zimbabwe, and more ominously, he claims to have direct communication with God who has the last word on what he should do or say in public. In politics, that’s an unworkable Jim Jones proposition. Because of his God complex, Chamisa is visible only when there are elections as he was in the 2018 harmonised general election, March 2022 by-elections and now for the 23 August harmonised general election. After he ditched his supporters in August 2018 when he called them "ma stupids" [stupid people], in January 2019 and in July 2020, his unavailability to provide leadership when his supporters needed it triggered a viral political joke that: ‘in Zimbabwe there are three things that are unavailable when you need them the most, the UN, a condom and Nelson Chamisa’. But even more telling aboutChamisa is the shocking way in which he has used CCC since its formation in January 2022, and particularly in the party’s candidate selection for the forthcoming elections, to ruthlessly purge the opposition. It's been scary and it explains why the opposition in Zimbabwe today is the most clueless and the weakest since independence in 1980. How can a democratic change champion insist on running a political party with no constitution, no structures, no bank account and no accountability? I cannot support a leader like that. There’s nothing more dangerous in politics than, a young 'popular' dictator with a God complex. My conscience and freedom to political choices freely do not allow me to support a leader like that. As for CCC, it has no ideology, no values, no constitution, no structures, no bank account, no policies and no other visible office bearers besides Chamisa, Gift Siziva, Fadzayi Mahere and Amos Chibaya; and it has not been launched to boot. There’s just no way anywhere on earth that a political formation like that can be supported by rational people with rational expectations. That’s why I cannot side with you David or with Chamisa or with CCC. You’re not “the alternative”, you’re just a worse and more dangerous alternative which can only be supported by polticidal people who do not mind moving from the frying pan into the fire! Jonathan Moyo 31 July 2023

Prof Jonathan Moyo

181,071 views • 3 years ago

"What was in the middle of the hangar was an actual flying saucer. ~GR A Secret Revealed After 33 Years - Have We Cracked Gravity? "We got it from them." (Rogers retired in April of this year.) In 1992, Dr. Gregory Rogers, a chief flight surgeon (a physician who's responsible for the health of the aviation crew, including pilots) for NASA and an Air Force major who supported 33 space shuttle launches and was also an F-18 pilot, was at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (now called Cape Canaveral Space Force Station). He had a guide from EG&G with him but that doesn't seem relevant to what happened next. A major pulled him aside and said, "Hey Doc, I've got something to show you, I've got something even you have never seen." Josh Boswell broke this story in May. H/T: Sentinel News The major took him into an office with four computer stations, locked the door and closed the blinds. They both sat down, and on one of the computer screens, the major pulled up a video that showed a generic hangar. The screen had no markings on it. No classification markings, no location, time, date, etc. "What was in the middle of the hangar was an actual flying saucer." (This next quote isn't part of my video clip and is at 25:08 of the Chris Lehto interview.) "So I said, 'Where would we get a design like this?' And [the major] said, 'We got it from them (shows his thumb pointing up).' He did not explain what he meant, but obviously, he was referring to non-human technologies from off this planet." "There were two guys in lab cats to the bottom left, and then midway up the screen on the right side, there were three guys that looked like technicians in what I would call Tyvek suits, head-to-toe. And only their faces were shown. "And then some sort of a warning sound went off and everybody cleared out. And then, within a couple of minutes, the vehicle became active." "The vehicle itself was sort of a pearly white. There were no seams, rivets, windows, doors. Nothing that could be identified. It looked as though it was sort of a modified egg, if you just sort of shifted it around. "There was a tiny little area on top that protruded and there was a mast that came out. And on the mast, it looked like there were three umbilicals coming off." There were various, flat-black rectangles (horizontal and vatical). "I believe that these were made to monitor the movement of this craft." [Since] "it was perfectly pearly white, and it began to move, there was nothing there to show you that it was moving. So, just like any experimental aircraft, they put markings on it so you could monitor the motion. And that's what I believe these rectangles were. "There were electromagnetic discharges that told me that the vehicle had become active, and they were very peculiar. But I don't wish to describe them to anyone because, if this was a test-bed model, whatever the mechanisms were being used may still be active in more advanced craft, and I don't want to give out information that would be beneficial to those opposing the United States. But, as soon as it started to do this... (Video picks up again here. 👇🏼 ) "...it just sort of lifted off the floor. The floor looked like a concrete floor with like, some sort of rubber matt that had been on top of it." "It lifted off, just like a feather. It rose about three feet in the air and then just hung there. The next thing that it does is that it rotates 360 degrees, clockwise. As it rotated across, I could see the writing, 'U.S. Air Force.' And then it had an American flight insignia just above that." "It completed a 360-degree circle, paused, and then completed a 360-degree circle counterclockwise, so that it was in the same position it had started in. It moved to the left and right, it moved forward and backwards. It's just like, you know, you're testing your controls, making sure you have everything working. "And then, it rotated to a 45-degree angle of attack, if it were flying and the 12-o'clock position (where the U.S. Navy and flight insignia was located) was going forward. This was amazing. Fixed-wing aircraft can't do this. A helicopter can go to a 45-degree angle of attack, but it's going to be moving forward and lifting. This thing did not do that. And so, this shocked me more than anything else, because it did not move one centimeter as it moved to what would be a 45-degree angle of attack. So that just blew me away. "Just about that time, there's a knock on the door. The guy hits the buttons to turn the computer and screen off, and he says, 'Don't tell anyone I showed you this!' "Well, I'm gonna go around telling somebody that you showed me a flying saucer? Well he goes to the door, opens it - we were both majors - and so this Lt. Colonel and two other guys came in. And so the Lt. Colonel said, "What's going on in here that you had the doors locked?" To see how they got out of this pickle, and why Rogers didn't turn in the major for showing him a classified video, watch the rest of the clip. "Along the way, I thought, 'I can't tell this to anybody.' I didn't even tell it to my wife for 15 years. But, as long as I was associated with the [DoD], I did not want to risk what the repercussions were gonna be as soon as I told this story. ~~~ How far have our reverse engineering efforts progressed? This is from my August of 2023 post. "There are people who say we have reverse-engineered them and are flying them. I never found any support for that. And found a lot of support for saying we can’t figure it out. If we do, it would be in some program at a higher security level.” ~Michael Shellenberger ~~~ Former intel and defense contractor, and my friend, Michael Via, who I've interviewed multiple times, had his sighting of a silent, black, "majestic" triangle craft in 1992 in the Persian Gulf. He thinks it's our tech. ~~~ And then there's Nick Cook, the former aviator editor for Jane's Defence Weekly and a very respected, award-winning journalist, and author. His gut tells him that we (humans) may have cracked gravity. But he doesn't have the proof. "I found plenty of evidence the US had been trying, tho. I have no firm evidence now (who does?), but 20 years on from #THFZP, I think it is possible the antigrav issue has been cracked. Wish I could say this was more than a hunch, but this is all it is." ~Nick Cook A hunch. Possible. ~~~ And my favorite anecdote of all time, from another person I consider a friend. Retired Commander Will Miller: "I had a friend, a former military officer who worked with me. [He went to work at] the famous Groom Lake facility, Area 51 and he was out there for several years. As we all know, most folks that work out there have signed their lives away, never to disclose what goes on and for better or for worse, and this fella was no different. And over the three years I worked with him – and he knew my interest in things extraterrestrial and my work with CSETI – never once did he mention any of his work out at Groom Lake or any association between that and anything extraterrestrial. "And the day I was leaving the command, he took me aside and he said, 'You know, Will, some of the folks you talk with, maybe some CSETI researchers, may see objects that are doing, you know, Mach 9 and then suddenly make a right angle turn and you say, "Well, gosh, that’s got to be an extraterrestrial craft."' "And then he looked at me and he said, 'But it’s not.' And he just turned and walked away." ~Commander Will Miller (Retired) My original post is here: ~~~ One thing that Dr. Gregory Rogers said to Lehto really jumped out at me: "And then, it rotated to a 45-degree angle of attack." Numerous witnesses have reported craft tilting up at a 45-degree angle right before they shoot off at a high rate of speed. I wrote a long thread on it (which I can't find) and Danny Silva wrote an article on it several years ago. Here's a thread from Willy Sam that covers some of that. And if you Google "UFO tilt up 45 degrees," you'll find more. Did we figure out something about UFOs and tilting up?

Joe Murgia

25,246 views • 1 year ago

In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore. They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute. Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry." He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns. He asked: "Can I collect my other things?" They said yes. He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days. When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through. The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive. 60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth: On what the war did to him: "We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought." Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed. "Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did." "But it changed us." "What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?" When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes. "Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?" On learning languages to lead: Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English. The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay. "So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien." "Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default." His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him. "I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding." By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent. "Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them." "That came respect." It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them. On fighting the Communists: The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born. "Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization." They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns. Lee stood up and said no. "They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages." English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each. "When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath." "But it was a fight for survival. Life or death." On where trust comes from: "It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'" "But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference." "Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore." On IQ vs EQ: Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader? "IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions." "But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings." "If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good." He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120." But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly. "He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know." "So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate." On corruption: Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime. "When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed." "We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent." He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio. "I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself." One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee. "I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer." The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price." "It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions." On consistency: Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches. He asked them: what was the dominant theme? All three said the same thing: consistency. "What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear." "That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do." On delivering results: "We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals." "Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000." "Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value." "But that was planned." Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own. "So we give everybody a stake." On changing culture slowly: Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it. "Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots." Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English. "They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched." It took 16 years. "I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack." On whether leadership can be taught: Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature. Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?" He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time." Lee's version: "Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so." "He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family." "You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it." "But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble." On sustaining yourself: Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership. "If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope." "But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you." "When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind." "If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit." In his later years, he learned to meditate. "At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind." "Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide." This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined. Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.

Jaynit

1,024,848 views • 3 months ago

‡ The Pacific Classic Result It was unfortunate that Nysos was scratched, but the result was interesting, with Fierceness, the 1.6/1 second-favorite, comfortably handling Journalism, the (overbet) 2/5 choice. That the odds of the remaining five runners ranged between 22/1 and 72/1, underscored the yawning gap in quality between the top pair and the rest. So it was clearly no surprise that the "also-rans" toiled in their wake. What was surprising, at least at first glance, was how well Fierceness appeared to handle less than ideal conditions. But on closer inspection, his trip was actually far less challenging than the vast majority of post-race takes have suggested. His having ducked in soon after the start, almost making contact with the temporary extension rail, could have been a disaster, but it wasn't, and its importance has arguably been overblown. I say that because it was not similar to the trouble that he had encountered early in some of his previous races, in that he was in his own space, and was neither bumped, constricted, nor otherwise intimidated by other runners. This is an important distinction, because the mental weakness that he had previously displayed was related to close encounters with other horses, and his ducking-in after the break did not fall into that category. Inexperienced horses may suffer from that type of self-inflicted event, but given a mature, experienced runner, they are almost always forgotten quickly, which was clearly the case here. The fact that it was a long race also helped to mitigate the event, as there was no need for the rider to panic, or feel pressure to make up ground immediately. It is even possible that the early ground loss actually helped Fierceness, as had he been drawn closer to the pace early, it could have rendered him vulnerable in the late stages of the race. At the same time, due to the inside post, and how the race unfolded, Johnny Velasquez, who has done such a brilliant job keeping Fierceness outside and clear of his rivals in his previous wins, was forced to make the best of racing inside of horses. I understand why some are tempted to argue that Fierceness displayed a new dimension, as there were no obvious signs of him having been intimidated, despite the inside trip. But while I am willing to consider the possibility that he has gained confidence, I remain skeptical of any significant change, in part because it would be highly unusual for a horse to overcome that type of mental weakness midway through its four-year-old season, and/or in its 13th start. I also remain unconvinced for more subtle reasons. First, Fierceness was never bounced around, and with the possible exception of the first turn, he was never forced to race in especially tight quarters. Secondly, the rhythm of the race, after the initial duck-in, was actually smooth, and therefore beneficial to him. To understand why the above points are important, consider that Fierceness was never, so to speak, allergic to racing inside, but was more likely to face contact, be squeezed into a tight space, or have his rhythm thrown off when breaking from an inside post. In contrast, when breaking from an outside post, JV has invariably been able to place him clear of the pack, and in a comfortable, stalking rhythm. Fierceness is also essentially a free-runner, with a "light" mouth, and as such performs best when his rider allows him to dictate his own rhythm and pace. That is why, for example, Johnny V was not at all responsible for his loss in the Breeders' Cup Classic, as he is not the type of horse that a rider can take a strong hold of in order to restrain him further off of the pace, as that would discourage him. And to the great credit of both JV and Todd Pletcher, they picked up on this early on, and have done a superb job mitigating the colt's limitations, and maximizing his potential. In the Pacific Classic, despite racing on the inside, Johnny V remained cool and calm, and gave Fierceness another masterful ride. He and the colt's connections did benefit though, as none of his rivals, either intentionally or not, tightened things up significantly, or otherwise disrupted his rhythm. In fact, quite the opposite. Having tracked comfortably through much of the race, and with space around him, Fierceness displayed his trademark spurt on the final turn. And while the pan shot may suggest that he slipped though a tight opening, it was more like the red sea parting, as the embedded head-on view illustrates. If you are able to view the full head-on replay, you will find that despite racing inside, Fierceness actually enjoyed quite a comfortable trip, after the eventful few strides. A more subtle indication that we were watching the same horse as in his previous races comes :12-14 seconds into the embedded clip. When he was about to take the lead, he cocked his head to the right, as if he may have been worried about the horse outside of him. He was able to draw away from that one so quickly that it was ultimately of no practical consequence, but I would say that it implies that he hasn't suddenly developed the heart of a lion. *** Two qualities that have been crucial to Fierceness' success are his tactical speed, coupled with the separation that he produces on the final turn of his (two-turn) races. His ability to take command at that crucial stage has served him very well, particularly in his narrow win over Thorpedo Anna, and it was again on display in the Pacific Classic. A big part of the reason why that move has been such an important part of his arsenal is that it typically allows his him to take a "breather", before digging deep in an effort to fend off any late dangers. I encourage you to watch the (pan) replay of the Pacific Classic, and focus on Johnny V from around the 3/8th pole to the head of the stretch, as he was sitting like the proverbial statue. So for at least a furlong and a half, Fierceness was on cruise control, while Journalism, his only danger, was under pressure to make up ground, in an attempt to simply reach striking distance. But with all due credit to Fierceness and his rider for having produced fine efforts in the Pacific Classic, was this really an exceptionally outstanding performance, or was it at least partly a reflection of his only serious rival failing to run his best? I'm inclined to argue the latter. Despite Journalism having produced an unusually good 3yo campaign, capped by three Gr. I wins, including a Classic success in the Preakness, and never finishing worse than second, there have been some lingering questions. One of them is whether he is actually as well-suited to 10f. as he is to 8-9f. races. Yes, he was beaten in his two previous tries over 10f. by Sovereignty, a better horse. But in each race he was able to gain first-run on that one, an advantage that is typically difficult to overcome, yet lost ground late to the winner both times, and to Baeza as well, in the KY Derby. Some have suggested that he may have a tendency to loaf when in front, but I haven't seen any compelling evidence of that. And such horses typically dig in when passed, in efforts to re-engage, which we haven't seen, at least overtly, from Journalism. He also drew away from his rivals late in his first three wins. Alex Evers made this interesting comment about the kickback in the Pacific Classic: "I've photographed racing for 20 years, I've never seen kick back knock a jockeys goggles off like this." Here is a link to his supporting photos, which are typically excellent: Could that have discouraged Journalism? I suppose that it could have been an impediment, but he is such a tough and honest horse, that I would be surprised to learn that it was a meaningful factor. By contemporary standards, Journalism has also had a busy campaign, having raced a touch over once per month since March, all but one of which in Grade I events, and four times well away from his home base. So it is possible that he is beginning to feel the effects of those races, and travels. I have also noted that from a Beyer figure standpoint, he hasn't really moved forward, and it's worth noting that in contrast to Sovereignty and Baeza, both of which were late (May) foals, Journalism was a February foal, and may not have had quite as much room to improve. I don't know why he lagged so far behind in the early stages of the Pacific Classic, or if there was any tactical intention behind it. I had previously suggested that it might make sense to ride him more patiently, a tactic that is sometimes adopted when there are questions about a horse staying a trip. But I didn't notice any improved late kick, so it's difficult to interpret the performance. Fierceness earned a 107 Beyer figure for his victory, slower than his best three races last year, and merely equivalent to his comeback victory in the Gr. II Alysheba at Churchill Downs, in May. That doesn't suggest that it was a particularly outstanding performance. Journalism was given a 102, which implies that the return to his home court did not catalyze any notable forward move. *** I would say that there is one relevant pattern that has emerged, namely that Fierceness has an apparent affinity for the faster, high energy return track surfaces in California. He has now contested three races in CA (Beyer): 1st Breeders' Cup Juvenile (105) 2nd Breeders' Cup Classic (111) 1st Pacific Classic (107) It's also interesting to compare the colt's first and last half-mile fractions in his effort in last year's BCC, and the PC, both contested at Del Mar over 10f.: BCC – :45 1/5 • :51 3/5 PC – :46 1/5 • :50 2/5 Predictably, he finished better in the PC, thanks to more manageable early fractions. But would a repeat of that effort be nearly sufficient to win this year's Classic? Given the various points noted above, coupled with Sovereignty's continued improvement, and seemingly bottomless stamina, I would be inclined to say no. And that's before even factoring Sierra Leone, Mindframe, Forever Young, et al, into the conversation. But setting aside all of the fine parsing, I'm happy to congratulate Repole Stable, and Fierceness' other connections, for having shipped to California, and for being rewarded with an exciting, winning effort. Assuming that the colt makes it to the Breeders' Cup Classic in good order, he should minimally add spice to the race, and who knows, perhaps even provide a serious challenge to knock Sovereignty off of his current throne.

Tinky

10,516 views • 11 months ago

50 years ago yesterday: U.N. General Assembly adopts initial draft resolution declaring Zionism to be “a form of racism.” U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered this historic speech when the infamous act was ratified on Nov. 10, 1975: 🇺🇸 “There appears to have developed in the United Nations the practice for a number of countries to combine for the purpose of doing something outrageous, and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the “insufferable” acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place. Out of deference to these curious sensibilities, the United States chose not to speak in advance of this vote: we speak in its aftermath and in tones of the utmost concern. The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act. Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing. It was, he said, “obscene.” It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness. There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the Abomination of anti-semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened. As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost. Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have participated in it, suppose, that we have fought only as governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed from the concerns of our respective peoples. Others will speak for their nations: I will speak for mine. In all our postwar history there had not been another issue which has brought forth such unanimity of American opinion. The President of the United States has from the first been explicit: This must not happen. The Congress of the United States in a measure unanimously adopted in the Senate and sponsored by 436 of 437 Representatives in the House, declared its utter opposition. Following only American Jews themselves, the American trade union movements was first to the fore in denouncing this infamous undertaking. Next, one after another, the great private institutions of American life pronounced anathema in this evil thing — and most particularly, the Christian churches have done so. Reminded that the United Nations was born in struggle against just such abominations as we are committing today — the wartime alliance of the United Nations dates from 1942 — the United Nations Association of the United States has for the first time in its history appealed directly to each of the 141 other delegations in New York not to do this unspeakable thing. The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Now this is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated. The very first point to be made is that the United Nations has declared Zionism to be racism — without ever having defined racism. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” as the Queen of Hearts said. But this is not wonderland, but a real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to venality. Just on Friday, the President of the General Assembly, speaking on behalf of Luxembourg, warned not only of the trouble which would follow from the adoption of this resolution but of its essential irresponsibility — for, he noted, members have wholly different ideas as to what they are condemning. “It seems to me that before a body like this takes a decision they should agree very clearly on what they are approving or condemning, and it takes more time.” Lest I be unclear, the United Nations has in fact on several occasions defined “racial discrimination.” The definitions have been loose, but recognizable. It is “racism,” incomparably the more serious charge — racial discrimination is a practice; racism is a doctrine — which has never been defined. Indeed, the term has only recently appeared in the United Nations General Assembly documents. The one occasion on which we know the meaning to have been discussed was the 1644th meeting of the Third Committee on December 16, 1968, in connection with the report of the Secretary-General on the status of the international convention on the elimination of all racial discrimination. On that occasion — to give some feeling for the intellectual precision with which the matter was being treated — the question arose, as to what should be the relative positioning of the terms “racism” and “Nazism” in a number of the “preambular paragraphs.” The distinguished delegate from Tunisia argued that “racism” should go first because “Nazism was merely a form of racism.” Not so, said the no less distinguished delegate from the Union Soviet Socialist Republics. For, he explained, “Nazism contained the main elements of racism within its ambit and should be mentioned first.” This is to say that racism was merely a form of Nazism. The discussion wound to its weary and inconclusive end, and we are left with nothing to guide us for even this one discussion of “racism” confined itself to world orders in preambular paragraphs, and did not at all touch on the meaning of the words as such. Still, one cannot but ponder the situation we have made for ourselves in the context of the Soviet statement on that not so distant occasion. If, as the distinguished delegate declared, racism is a form of Nazism — and if, as this resolution declares, Zionism is a form of racism — then we have step to step taken ourselves to the point of proclaiming — the United Nations is solemnly proclaiming — that Zionism is a form of Nazism. What we have here is a lie — a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that is it not. The word “racism” is a creation of the English language, and relatively new to it. It is not, for instance, to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (appears in 1982 supplement to Oxford Dictionary). The term derives from relatively new doctrines — all of them discredited — concerning the human population of the world, to the effect that there are significant biological differences among clearly identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in effect, different levels of humanity. Racism, as defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, is “The Assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another.” It further involves “a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to dominate over others.” This meaning is clear. It is equally clear that this assumption, this belief, has always been altogether alien to the political and religious movement known as Zionism. As a strictly political movement, Zionism was established only in 1897, although there is a clearly legitimate sense in which its origins are indeed ancient. For example, many branches of Christianity have always held that from the standpoint of biblical prophets, Israel would be reborn one day. But the modern Zionism movement arose in Europe in the context of a general upsurge of national consciousness and aspiration that overtook most other people of Central and Eastern Europe after 1848, and that in time spread to all of Africa and Asia. It was, to those persons of the Jewish religion, a Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation movement. Probably a majority of those persons who became active Zionists and sought to emigrate to Palestine were born within the confines of Czarist Russia, and it was only natural for Soviet Prime Minister Andrei Gromyko to deplore, as he did in 1948, in the 299th meeting of the Security Council, the act by Israel’s neighbors of “sending troops into Palestine and carrying out military operations aimed” — in Mr. Gromyko’s words — at the suppression of the national liberation movement in Palestine.” Now it was the singular nature — if, I am not mistaken, it was the unique nature — of this national liberation movement that in contrast with the movements that preceded it, those of that time, and those that have come since, it defined its members in terms not of birth, but of belief. That is to say, it was not a movement of the Irish to free Ireland, or of the Polish to free Poland, not a movement of the Algerians to free Algeria, nor of Indians to free India. It was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership to a genetic pool of the kind that enables us to speak loosely but not meaninglessly, say, of the Chinese people, nor yet of diverse groups occupying the same territory which enables us to speak if the American people with no greater indignity to truth. To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or — and this is the absolutely crucial fact — anyone who converted to Judaism. Which is to say, in terms of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the 20th General Assembly, anyone — regardless of “race, colour, descent, or nationally or ethnic origin …..” The state of Israel, which in time was the creation of the Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much as the range of “racial stocks” from which it Orient and Jew from the West. Most such persons could be said to have been “born” Jewish, just as most Presbyterians and most Hindus are “born” to their faith, but there are many Jews who are just converts. With a consistency in the matter which surely attests to the importance of this issue to that religions and political culture, Israeli courts have held that a Jew who converts to another religion is no longer a Jew. In the meantime the population of Israel also includes large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe. Now I should wish to be understood that I am here making one point, and one point only, which is that whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be “a form of racism.” In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically, including many things undesirable, but it could not be and could not become racism unless it ceased to be Zionist. Indeed, the idea that Jews are a “race” was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews. The idea of Jews as a race was invented by nineteenth century anti-semites such as Houston Steward Chamberlain and Edouard Drumont, who saw that in an increasingly secular age, which is to say an age made for fewer distinctions between people, the old religions grounds for anti-semitism were losing force. New justifications were needed for excluding and persecuting Jews, and so the new idea of Jews as a race — rather than as a religion — was born. It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it. To think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United Nations is to reflect on what civilization has come to. It is precisely a concern for civilization, for civilized values that are or should be precious to all mankind, that arouses us at this moment to such special passion. What we have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy of the State of Israel — although a challenge to the legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arouse the vigilance of all members of the United Nations. For a yet more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of the whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights. The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences. Not only will people begin to say, indeed they have already begun to say that the United Nations is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights itself. The harm will arise first because it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still precariously holds today. How will the people of the world feel about racism and the need to struggle against it, when they are told that it is an idea as broad as to include the Jewish national liberation movement? As the lie spreads, it will do harm in a second way. Many of the members of the United Nations owe their independence in no small part to the notion of human rights, as it has spread from the domestic sphere to the international sphere exercised its influence over the old colonial powers. We are now coming into a time when that independence is likely to be threatened again. There will be new forces, some of them arising now, new prophets and new despots, who will justify their actions with the help of just such distortions of words as we have sanctioned here today. Today we have drained the word “racism” of its meaning. Tomorrow, terms like “national self-determination” and “national honor” will be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of conquest and exploitation. And when these claims begin to be made — as they already have begun to be made — it is the small nations of the world whose integrity will suffer. And how will the small nations of the world defend themselves, on what grounds will others be moved to defend and protect them, when the language of human rights, the only language by which the small can be defended, is no longer believed and no longer has a power of its own? There is this danger, and then a final danger that is the most serious of all. Which is that the damage we now do to the idea of human rights and the language of human rights could well be irreversible. The idea of human rights as we know it today is not an idea which has always existed in human affairs, it is an idea which appeared at a specific time in the world, and under very special circumstances. It appeared when European philosophers of the seventeenth century began to argue that man was a being whose existence was independent from that of the State, that he need join a political community only if he did not lose by that association more than he gained. From this very specific political philosophy stemmed the idea of political rights, of claims that the individual could justly make against the state; it was because the individual was seen as so separate from the State that he could make legitimate demands upon it. That was the philosophy from which the idea of domestic and international rights sprang. But most of the world does not hold with that philosophy now. Most of the world believes in newer modes of political thought, in philosophies that do not accept the individual as distinct from and prior to the State, in philosophies that therefore do not provide any justification for the idea of human rights and philosophies that have no words by which to explain their value. If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words. But there are those of us who have not forsaken these older words, still so new to much of the world. Not forsaken them now, not here, not anywhere, not ever. The United States of America declares that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.”

Hillel Neuer

68,720 views • 10 months ago

Over the last decade, a consensus has grown on the Left and Right that the US needs to be more self-sufficient when it comes to manufacturing. During Covid, we discovered we didn’t make much of the equipment we needed to deal with a pandemic and were thus dependent on other nations, and so Congress passed and Trump signed the CARES Act in part to spend money to support domestic manufacturing of medical supplies. In 2022, a bipartisan majority in Congress passed the CHIPS Act to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. out of the recognition that we had become dangerously dependent on foreign nations for microchips, which have become general-purpose technologies, necessary for national security, and upon which the AI revolution will be built. Where America had a $38 billion trade surplus in 1991 on advanced technology manufacturing, today it has a $299 billion deficit. Liberals and conservatives, Leftists and Rightists, have long shared a broad agreement that manufacturing and its knock-on industries are an essential source of employment for non-college-educated working-class people, and that the loss of manufacturing contributed to social fragmentation, family breakdown, and the drug addiction and death crisis. In a 2024 survey, Americans agreed ten to one that “we need a stronger manufacturing sector; 47% said America suffered from globalization, while 33% said it benefited. It is partly for that reason that Joe Biden, in perhaps the most bipartisan and non-ideological decision of his presidency, kept in place the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his first term as president. And yet both liberals and many conservatives are reacting with outrage as President Donald Trump puts in place precisely the trade tariffs needed to reduce our dangerous dependency on other nations and increase our manufacturing of the goods we need for national security, economic security, and societal wellbeing. The China tariffs, the CARES Act, and the CHIPS Act did not result in the return of much manufacturing, much less the rebalancing of trade. Total manufacturing jobsare 12.8 million in December 2019 and are 12.8 million today. The US still depends on China and other nations for active pharmaceutical ingredients, personal protective equipment, microchips, and critical minerals. Suffice to say, we are a very long way from a manufacturing renaissance sufficiently robust to revitalize the communities that have lost good, high-wage jobs to China and other competitors and even rivals internationally. The reason is clear. The average tariff level globally is 6.7% compared to America’s 2.7%. And simply subsidizing industries may not be enough for two major semiconductor manufacturers, Intel and TSMC, to produce domestically without tariffs. US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. Trump geared up to unveil sweeping new "Liberation Day" tariffs in a move that threatens to ignite a devastating global trade war. Key US trading partners including the European Union and Britain said they were preparing their responses to Trump's escalation, as nervous markets fell in Europe and America. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)📷 Anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say Trump’s actions will destroy people’s retirement savings by crashing the stock market, and will undermine the comparative advantage of other nations producing products we shouldn’t. And, they say, our goal should not be to return manufacturing to the United States, except for a few exceptions, which Congress has already made. For centuries, economists have argued that some nations, such as poorer ones, are more suited to produce many products than richer ones. Americans making t-shirts at $20 per hour are less efficient than the Vietnamese making them for $3 per hour. And the US should not be trying to replace perfectly reasonable products to import, like aluminum from Canada, which we have no reason to ever go to war with, and which has access to cheap hydroelectricity to make it. Over half of American families have money in the stock market, and they will all suffer, anti-tariff liberals and conservatives say. The economic system we have had since World War II has worked to maximize win-win relationships that result in poorer nations climbing the development ladder with manufacturing and wealthier nations like the US focused on services. But it’s unwise to evaluate policies based on the short-term impact of the stock market. Anti-tariff voices grossly overstate the comparative advantage when it comes to manufacturing, and the postwar system, economically and militarily, is no longer in the interests of non-college-educated Americans, who are both more vulnerable and more numerous than the college-educated elite. There is no need to bring back a significant amount of low-skill and nonstrategic manufacturing like T-shirts, and Trump has not advocated that. America may need to bring back some low-skill jobs, such as manufacturing protective gear. But our priority should rightly be high-skill manufacturing, and CARES, CHIPS, and the Trump-Biden China were, obviously, not enough. It may be fine to rely on Canada for aluminum. But the tariffs against it and Mexico, as well as Trump’s stated desire to make it the 51st state, should be viewed as the president negotiating in preparation for upcoming trade talks between the three countries. While offshoring manufacturing policies benefited multinational corporations, bankers, and consumers, they often devastated communities built on manufacturing, mining, and manual labor. US companies moved production to countries with lower labor costs, fewer regulations, and subsidized exports. Economists calculate that just the so-called “China Shock,” that country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, alone cost the U.S. 2.4 million jobs and had ripple effects across entire communities. The average manufacturing wage is $103,000 per year compared to $37,000 per year for the average service sector wage. And where a service sector job supports 2 to 3 jobs, a manufacturing job supports nine jobs. Continuing with a system that is fundamentally advantageous to a minority of the country and disadvantageous to a majority is not sustainable and unwise to prop up. Trump’s trade actions are part of a broader return to nationalism underway globally, and they can’t be understood on economic grounds alone. Regarding priorities, we should put the two-thirds of the country that is non-college educated working-class ahead of the 50% of the country who own stocks, for moral and democratic reasons. America is deeply divided. While there are many proximate reasons for this, including geographic sorting, cable TV, and social media, the underlying reasons are economic. The gulf between the educated elites and the non-educated working class has grown dangerously large. Many critics of the tariffs are well-intentioned. They are right to worry that they could come with significant economic costs and disruption. The concern of many of them is genuinely for the working class and poor, who higher prices for imported goods would most harm. However, many American elites today identify more with their global counterparts than their fellow Americans. And that’s a huge problem. In his study of 21 civilizations, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee found that civilizations collapse not simply from external invasion but from internal decay, precisely when their elites stop identifying with the people. “Civilizations die from suicide,” he famously wrote, “not murder.” Civilizations all depend on their elites, Toynbee noted, or the people he called the “creative minority.” But rising success creates decadence, complacency, and eventually contempt toward their people, and they start to identify with elites in other nations. This is all a natural outgrowth of trade, cosmopolitanism, and snobbery. It starts to view the ordinary people as “deplorables.” At this point, the elite lose their creativity and become simply the “dominant minority,” one that rules no longer by example but rather by manipulation or force. Toynbee could be describing America in the 21st Century. College-educated elites look down on the American working class and identify with other professional and managerial elites in Europe and other nations. They sympathize less with the low-skilled American citizen born here and more with the low-skilled foreign migrant here illegally. Such elites are more concerned with tariffs' impact on their stock portfolio and the cost of their gadgets than they are with the downward pressure illegal migrants put on wages or with how nations manipulate their currency to retain manufacturing. Toynbee said that, at this stage of development, a nation’s elites become “parasites or renegades,” alienated and contemptuous toward the culture that produced them. Civilizations at this late stage are morally hollow and thus fragile and prone to abuses of power, like censorship, lawfare, and the weaponization of government agencies. And these civilizations disparage their traditions in ways that the American elites have disparaged America’s founding and its history as essentially evil, due to the unavoidable tragedy of indigenous genocide and slavery, even though a civil war that killed over 600,000 people was fought to end it. But Toynbee didn’t believe that civilizational collapse was inevitable; some societies can snap back.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!

Michael Shellenberger

56,944 views • 1 year ago

BOOM!!! 💥💥💥 Dr. Aseem Malhotra's testimony was delivered in the Helsinski District Court on April 12, 2024, with the understanding that any deviation from the truth would constitute perjury. This clip was immediately banned by YouTube so please share widely. I've trimmed the clip, removing the interpreter's segment for a smoother listening experience. Here's the first hour of the testimony. ---------------------------------- My name is Doctor Aseem Malhotra. I am a consultant cardiologist. I've been a qualified doctor since 2001. I have held various roles both in academic health policy. In England, in the United Kingdom, and of the various roles, I won't bore you with all the details. I think three of the most relevant and prominent are the fact that I was an ambassador for the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges for six years, which represented every doctor in the UK. I served a full term of six years as a trustee of the King's fund. I was the youngest member to be appointed to this body which advises government on health policy. I was a founding member of Action on Sugar and a first science director. And through that role I'm considered the lead campaigner on bringing about a sugary drinks tax in the UK. And also, finally I served for five years as visiting professor of evidence based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine in Salvador, Brazil. In early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic I was most vocal doctor on the mainstream, making the link very early on between COVID and those who are vulnerable to suffering serious complications from COVID In fact, in March 2020, I was asked to go on Sky News to explain my initial research findings of the link between especially obesity and COVID, but also to give people an opportunity and to suggest to the government this was a great time for them to implement public health policy to help people enhance or optimise their immune system, which could happen within just a few weeks of dietary changes and optimising vitamin D. This was later also backed up by medical journal publications a few months later. And I was first to mention on the back of an article I published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which became a front page commentary and was picked up by BBC News and Good Morning Britain, where I had said that it's likely our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was hospitalised because of his weight. As a result of that, the then secretary for health, Matt Hancock, and this was publicised in the news, had asked me to advise him on the link between COVID and obesity. ...before I explain my journey and in many ways U-turn on my understanding in terms of the benefits and harms of the COVID vaccine, my experience in this area over the last couple of years has made me realise more than ever that even for that the greatest barrier to the truth are not factual or intellectual barriers, but psychological. I think all of us as human beings are vulnerable to these psychological barriers and we should have compassion for ourselves. And I will just very briefly summarise those three psychological barriers before I get into my detailed account of what I was involved in in regards to the COVID vaccine. The first psychological barrier is one of fear. And many of us understandably, and I still remember from early on in the pandemic, we were all scared. We did not know what we were dealing with. The issue with fear is that when people and populations are in a state of fear, we are less likely to engage in critical thinking and we are more likely to be compliant. Although COVID was particularly devastating for vulnerable groups in the elderly and I even have managed and still manage people with long COVID, the fear was grossly exaggerated. And one of the examples of that is that when we had good information on the mortality rate of COVID in the United States, one survey in 2020 revealed that 50% of Americans believed that if they caught COVID, the risk of 19 hospitalisation was 50% one and two, when the actual figure, certainly an average for people in middle age, was less than 1%. The second barrier to the truth, which I think is very relevant to the situation we find ourselves in now, is one called willful blindness. This is when human beings, all of us, are vulnerable to this, turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and to protect prestige and fragile egos. Some examples of this include, on a personal level, willful blindness can occur when a spouse turns a blind eye to the affair of their partner. On an institutional level, some great examples of willful blindness include Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church and child molestation. I believe the current situation we find ourselves in, with much of the mainstream narrative and the medical establishment and policy makers not acknowledging quite horrific, serious and common harms from this vaccine, is another example of willful blindness. And I also say this with full empathy, because I was one of those people that was for a very long time, willfully blind to the harms of the COVID vaccine. In January 2021, I was one of the first people to take two doses of the COVID mRNA vaccine because I volunteered in a vaccine centre. I still believe that traditional vaccines are some of the safest amongst all pharmacological interventions in medicine and I could not conceive of any possibility whatsoever of this vaccine causing harm. As a public figure and respected doctor in the UK, I have built relationships across the board with many other public figures, including celebrities and politicians, who often come to me for medical advice. One of those people was film director Gurinder Chadha, who you may be familiar with some of her work, including the movie "Bend It like Beckham", who had asked me whether or not she should take the vaccine and had sent me blogs which I dismissed and regarded as anti vax nonsense. I was then asked to go on good morning, Britain because Gurinder Chadha, the director herself tweeted that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. The main reason for this TV appearance was to help tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was very prominent amongst people from ethnic minority groups in the UK. I made the point on that programme that I understand where vaccine hesitancy was coming from because of the history that I have been involved with over many years in highlighting the shortcomings of pharmaceutical industry influence over medicine. And I even made the point, if I remember correctly, that they have been found guilty of fraud on many occasions, that the third most common cause of death, prepandemic after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications. I, however, reassured the public and said that despite these figures, of everything we do in medicine, traditional vaccinations are amongst the safest. I still believe this to be the case. A few months later, in April 2021, I met with a colleague and friend of mine who I regard as one of the brightest cardiologists in the United Kingdom. I was surprised when he told me that he had not taken the COVID vaccine. He explained to me that he had concerns because he had seen in the supplementary appendix of Pfizer's original trial that there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo. These numbers were small and did not reach statistical significance. So this could be random chance, or his concern was it could represent a signal of problems in the future. And if this was the case, we are going to have a huge problem. He said he'd rather wait and see what happens before taking the vaccine. On July 26, 2021, my father, aged 73, who was a very prominent, well known doctor in the UK, including being the honorary vice president of the British Medical Association and had received honours from the Queen of England with an OBE, suffered an unexpected sudden cardiac arrest. I was particularly devastated by this happening and I was also I find it difficult to understand why my father, who was a fit and well man, I knew his cardiac history and his cardiac status, would suffer a cardiac arrest. But also my initial investigation was to try and understand why there had been a 30 minutes ambulance delay arriving to his apartment. Two weeks later, the deputy chief nurse of NHS England, a government health body, called me up. She was very upset, she knew my father very well and she was crying and she told me, Aseem, there's something I need to tell you. She in effect told me that throughout the country, for the last two months prior to my father's cardiac arrest in most regions of the UK, ambulances were not getting to patients in time for heart attacks and cardiac arrests. And there had been a deliberate, and I will use these words because I mentioned it, I've mentioned it before, a cover up involving the government and the Department of Health to withhold this information from doctors and the public. I worked with an investigative journalist with the I newspaper in the UK to write an article and a news story that became BBC News headlines a few months later, exposing this. Just before I exposed this, I messaged a professor of cardiology who I trust in the UK. He has a leadership role to explain to him what had happened and what I was about to do. I have text message evidence of this. He told me not to do this because it would make me enemies. I explained to him that I had a duty to patients and the public. I'm highlighting this as one example and I'll give you more examples of a cultural problem within medicine. The next part of this story is the post mortem findings of my father. They did not make any sense to me. I am considered a leading expert, maybe in the world, on the development and progression of coronary artery disease. My father had two severe blockages in his coronary arteries. There was no actual evidence of heart attack and likely there was a rhythm disturbance because of reduced blood supply that led to his cardiac arrest. Then in, within the space of a few weeks, around October and November, 3, different sources of information was brought to my attention that made me realise that there was probably a significant problem with the COVID mRNA vaccine. The first in October 2021. I remember I was giving lectures in Stockholm. I was contacted by a journalist with a Times newspaper who reported to me and said, Dr Malhotra, we have reports of an unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks in hospitals in Scotland and asked me what I thought was going on. I explained to her that at that time, with the evidence I knew in my own experience, I said that two likely contributory factors were lockdown stress. We know that when populations undergo severe stress after war, for example, there is an increase in heart attacks and strokes that can last for many years. She asked me whether I thought that there was a contribution. I was surprised when she asked me whether I thought there may be a contribution of the COVID vaccine to these heart attacks. I said to her, a good scientist should never exclude any possibility. But I felt at the time it was unlikely to be related to the COVID vaccine. But we should watch this space and keep our eyes open. A few weeks later, a publication appeared in the Journal Circulation, which is considered the highest impact cardiology journal in the United States that revealed a potentially very strong link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and acceleration in heart attack risk. Very specifically, in several hundred people of middle age, there was a plausible mechanism, by use of inflammatory markers in the blood, that increased the baseline risk of those people having a heart attack in five years, from 11% to 25%, just within two months of having the COVID mRNA vaccines. Of course, this is one bit of data, but even if partially true, that is a huge increase in risk in a very short space of time. And for me now made me think and link back to why my father may have suffered a cardiac arrest six months after having two doses of the vaccine. I remember thinking and speaking to a colleague, that if this was true, then we were going to see an increase in cardiac arrests, heart attacks and excess deaths in heavily vaccinated countries for the next few years. Then within a few weeks, I was called up by a whistleblower at a very prestigious british institution. I will name that institution, which I have not done publicly before as a University of Oxford. This cardiologist explained to me that a group of researchers in his department had accidentally found, through the use of very specialised imaging of the heart, that there was a signal of increased inflammation of the heart arteries, which was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated. The lead researcher of that group had sat down, the juniors, and had said that we are not going to explore these findings any further because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry. At that point, with these three bits of information, I then felt it was my ethical duty to speak out. And I went on GBNews to talk about what I'd found what I'd heard and I'd asked for the Vaccine Committee of the UK on TV to investigate this, to see whether there was a real problem with the vaccine in relation to heart issues. Around the same time which I found very strange is that the Secretary of State for Health at that stage, who was not Matt Hancock, was Sajid Javid, had announced in parliament that we are going to introduce legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers are mandated to have the COVID vaccine. For me, this, by that stage had no ethical or scientific justification, because certainly after the summer of 2021, it had become very apparent that the COVID mRNA vaccine was not stopping infection and it certainly was not stopping transmission. It was understood that approximately 80,000 NHS workers had refused at this stage to have the COVID vaccine. And now they were threatened with losing their job if by April the following year they had not been fully vaccinated. Many of these people were very concerned and contacted me around that time, I was also conducting many interviews, both through the BBC and Sky News and GBNews in regards to what happened with my father's ambulance delay. And I used it as an opportunity on the mainstream media to call for Sajid Javid, the secretary for health, to U-turn on the introduction of a mandate for healthcare workers based upon the fact that I felt it was not scientific and it was unethical. I also received my own personal backlash from these comments where I was contacted by the Royal College of Physicians who I had an affiliation with, and they asked me to respond to anonymous complaints from doctors that I was spreading, in quotes, antivax disinformation. I felt with my own knowledge and experience of the healthcare system that this was a direct response probably fueled by a combination of willful blindness and institutional corruption. To elaborate a bit further, when I say institutional corruption, I mean that my view was that the complaints were likely being fueled by academics with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. I felt very concerned about the potential introduction of the vaccine, well, the vaccine mandate. And therefore I decided there were two things that I decided to do. The first was I made a phone call to the chairman of the British Medical Association in December 2021. I had a good relationship with him and he respected my opinion. And I spent 2 hours on the phone explaining to him everything that I knew up to that stage about my concerns of the COVID mRNA vaccine. He said to me, "Aseem, nobody appears to critically appraise the evidence on the COVID mRNA vaccine as well as you have from our conversation, he said, most of my colleagues are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC". This was replicated by the former chair of the CDC in the United States, Rochelle Walensky, who in an interview later on had said that her initial optimism of the vaccine benefits came from CNN News report. I say this just to emphasise that we should all accept our vulnerabilities to where we receive health information. Even doctors, policymakers, judges and lawyers are all influenced on the public massively by mainstream media. The chairman of the BMA also agreed with me. There was no ethical or scientific justification for mandating the COVID vaccine. He said the BMA also did not support it. And he said because of my conversation with him, he would speak directly to the secretary for health, Sajid Javid. One month later, at the end of January 2022, the COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers was overturned. I at that stage, given the fact that there was some backlash happening towards me, I realised that because this is a very big issue and area, and not my initial area of expertise, I needed to carry out my own critical analysis of the COVID mRNA vaccines. I spent six to nine months critically appraising the data, including speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, three investigative medical journalists and eminent scientists from the University of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard. The most critical bit, the most critical research that was published on this issue, which I think the whole court should acknowledge in August 2022, was published in the journal Vaccine. That research was conducted by some of the world's top independent of drug industry influence academics. That research, we was able to reanalyze the original randomised control trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. They were able to do this because new information was made available on the FDA's website and Health Canada's website. The conclusions of that paper were really very disturbing. The original trials that led to the drug regulatory approval of these vaccines revealed that you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine, specifically hospitalisation, life changing event or disability, than you were to be hospitalised with COVID That rate of harm at two months was very high at 1 in 800. Just to give you some perspective, historically we have suspended other vaccines for much less. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a neurological syndrome called Guillain-Barre syndrome In one in 100,000 people. In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting 1 in 10,000. This was 1 in 800. In my view, it was very clear that given this information, published in the highest impact Vaccine journal in the world, peer reviewed, and has not had any significant rebuttals, that this vaccine now, in my view, should never have been approved for use in a single human being in the first place. In my view, this very important court case in some ways, actually is a distraction from the much bigger issue, which is there should be court cases around the world with a full inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry and an inquiry as to how we got this so very wrong. Of course, one could argue this is just one bit of research, but actually, unfortunately, there are different, many different strands of research that are showing a signal of considerable and common serious harm from these vaccines. From pharmacovigilance data that is reporting what we call yellow card reports from the public. We have plausible biological mechanism of harm. We have other research called observational data. We have autopsy data also confirming that certainly with the majority of people who died within a short space of time of having the vaccine in relation to the heart, was definitively caused by the vaccine. This is really a very, very, very horrific situation we find ourselves in. One would hope and expect that the regulators should be independently evaluating all medications. But of course, the evidence reveals this is far from true. There was an investigation by the BMJ, also published in the summer of 2022, which revealed that most of the major regulators across the world were taking most of their money from the drug industry. For example, the MHRA in the UK receives 86% of its funding from the drug industry, and the FDA in America receives 65% of its funding from the drug industry, A fact that most doctors do not know. And therefore, I would not expect members of the court to know this either, is that very, very rarely do drug industry sponsored research get independently evaluated. Clinical trial data can often involve thousands of pages of information on individual patients. The drug companies hold onto that raw data. They then give summary results to the regulator, who are then paying, who have an incentive to approve the drugs, and the drugs are then approved. I made these points in my peer reviewed article published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in September 2022, where I concluded that we should pause and investigate the issue around the COVID mRNA vaccines. I have since then been campaigning and advocating for a return to ethical evidence based medical practise around the world. Some of the clear solutions moving forward would be changes in the law that are required so that patients, doctors, members of the public can have greater confidence in the information they receive to make decisions about their health. Two very clear, low hanging fruit solutions, which are both ethical, scientific and democratic, would be that the drug industry should be allowed to develop drugs, but they shouldn't be allowed to test them themselves. And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to design their own research to and hold onto the raw data. Their information needs to be independently evaluated. One other clear solution would also be that the medical regulators, again, should not be taking any money from the industry, as this is a gross conflict of interest. I also want to highlight for people to understand the bigger picture. Prior to the pandemic, I had realised that there was a big problem with the reliability of clinical research, where invariably the results of clinical trials on all drugs sponsored by the drug industry, grossly exaggerate their safety and benefits. I have taken this information to the European Parliament, where I spoke in 2019, and I spoke to very senior politicians in the UK government. But although they were sympathetic, they felt that the issue was much bigger than them as individuals, and therefore it also needed media attention to get public awareness on the importance of such an inquiry. Before we continue with further questions, as I've been speaking for quite a long time now I'll just finish with two references just for the court and the judges to understand just how bad this problem is. Prepandemic the man who I call the Stephen Hawking of medicine is Professor John Ioannidis from the University of Stanford. The reason I call him the Stephen Hawking of Medicine is he's the most cited medical researcher in the world and is a mathematical genius. In 2006, he published a paper which was entitled why most published research findings are false. In that paper, he makes a point that the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. I say this in context of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine which has made the company $100 billion. The other point that he makes in a further paper in 2017 is, again, the reason the system continues as it is is most doctors are unaware of the information they receive when they make clinical decisions has been corrupted by commercial influence. The other credible name I will mention is the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, who I personally know. In 2015, he wrote an article in the Lancet in relation to a secret meeting that had taken place with himself and some of the world's top medical academics. In that, he wrote that possibly half of the medical published literature may simply be untrue. And he said that science has taken a turn towards darkness. But who's going to take the first step to clean up the system? I believe in this case and in this court today, this is going to be a very pivotal potential moment in history for that first step. ---------------------- Dr Aseem Malhotra H/T: Tiina Keskimäki 🇫🇮

aussie17

797,301 views • 2 years ago

My cousin, Jonathan Ord asked me to teach the Come Follow Me lesson to his mission yesterday over zoom. This is the video I did and the full text. Hi. I am Brad Smith. I have ALS, which is a really weird disease that kills the motor neurons in my body. That means that I lose the connections between my brain and my muscles. My mind is still running at the normal rate. So, I can understand everything you say to me, but I can’t respond very quickly! I am getting faster, though. Last November I was the 3rd person in the world to receive the Neuralink brain implant. So I am controlling this computer with my brain. This is my old voice, recreated by AI from just two hours of me talking to my phone. I have come to see ALS as a calling, and I am trying to magnify it. I used to talk easily, but now I have to choose my words carefully, because it is hard and slow to type what I want to say. I joke that the Lord gave me ALS to get me to shut up. Those who knew me when I could talk laugh the hardest. President Ord is my first cousin. So we share grandma and grandpa Smith. Our grandma Smith was a character. When she taught at church, she would put a sign up that read: “thus saith the lord:” so I will try to keep this within what the Lord has actually said, while trying to teach you to look at a basic principle of the gospel in a different way. Ironically, the first verse of Doctrine & Covenants 93 starts with “Verily, thus saith the Lord”. This is an amazing section of scripture, Jesus Christ telling us to step up and be better! You should study it often. I will start with a story. I asked AI to make a video to dramatically tell the story. During college, I lived in Damascus, Syria, for a semester. It was a fantastic and wonderful experience. I especially loved exploring the Old City of Damascus. The Old City is built around the huge beautiful Umayyad mosque. Within the walls of the old city is a maze of narrow, winding, confusing streets and one really long straight street, as Saul found out in Acts 9:11. One day when a group of us were trying to get through this maze from the mosque to the Christian quarter of the Old City, we asked a man for directions. He thought for a second, then pointed and said, “Go left and then right, and then left and then right, and then left and then right, and then left and right, and you’ll be there.” Aren’t those the most ridiculous directions you have ever heard? We could have ignored him. But, we thought, he did know the city better than we did. So, with some laughter, off we went. Left. Right. Left. Right. And so on until, much to our surprise, we popped out at our destination. Life is a confusing maze. We face difficult choices, unexpected events, surprises, sorrows, opportunities, roadblocks. The Lord has given directions on how to get through to where we want to go. Sometimes the Lord’s directions seem odd, and we may struggle with the decision to follow. The Lord will not force us. It is our choice whether to choose and follow him. Wasn’t that fun? AI is getting crazy! I will be much less entertaining for the rest, but hopefully the spirit will teach you something new. The phrase “keep the commandments” (or “keepeth my commandments”) appears at least 4 times in Doctrine and Covenants Section 93, in verses 1, 20, 27, and 28. There are other references, like “keep my sayings” in 52 and “obeyeth my voice” in 1. So, commandments are really important in this Revelation. I suggest that making the gospel a more central part of our lives depends largely on how we look at commandments. When you think of commandments, do you think “I can’t. I’m Mormon”? (That was a popular T-shirt slogan during my college years.) Although, with the recent guidance from President Nelson, it probably should be “I can’t, I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints”. It’s a common reaction: “Thou shalt not do Cool Things.” People LOVE to focus on all the things we CAN’T do, as if we are trapped and deserve pity for our beliefs. No pity is needed. Commandments are opportunities, not constraints. Commandments are awesome! Allow me to illustrate. Imagine a spectrum between Good and Evil. Somewhere in the middle is “the Line” that divides Good from Evil. As a teenager, I wanted to know where the Line was, so I could get close to it without going over it. I wanted to be on the “Good” side but still be able to do as many “Cool Things" with my friends as possible. From my experience, I believe God gives us two types of commandments: 1) Get Back over the Line commandments and 2) Come Further into the Light commandments. Type 1, the Get Back over the Line commandments, could also be called “Misery Avoidance” commandments. They are designed to keep us out of misery or, if we’ve crossed the Line, to bring us out of misery and back into the Good side. These are generally commandments with a clear and defined point of success, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” You will know, at the end of each day, whether you have successfully followed that commandment. I think all of the Ten Commandments fall into this category. The law of Moses was very black and white. The children of Israel had been in Egypt without a prophet for a long time when Moses received the law, and they needed to work on the basics. So, if you follow the Type 1 commandments, you will refrain from doing things that make you miserable. You will know you are in the Good if you can answer the baptismal interview and temple recommend questions honestly and faithfully. If you can do that, you have taken the basic steps necessary to avoid misery and are on a solid foundation for the next type of commandment. Type 2, the “Come Further into the Light” commandments, are the really cool commandments. Once we are out of the misery category, we can really start to pursue joy. So, God commands us to do things that he knows will make us happier and more like Christ. These commandments are the principles of eternal development, such as “Love thy neighbor” (Matthew 22:39). There is no clear end to loving our neighbor—it requires positive and eternal progression. We can always love more, and we can always find another neighbor who needs our love. It is an eternal principle taught by Jesus Christ. And if we truly love our neighbor, refraining from killing him becomes pretty easy. It is through these commandments that we find joy in Jesus Christ. Elder Christofferson taught about this spectrum in the October 2018 general conference: “Most of us find ourselves at this moment on a continuum between a socially motivated participation in gospel rituals on the one hand and a fully developed, Christlike commitment to the will of God on the other. Somewhere along that continuum, the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ enters into our heart and takes possession of our soul. It may not happen in an instant, but we should all be moving toward that blessed state.” Our goal is to go THAT WAY (toward Christ) as much as possible. So first, get back across the line and stop doing things that will make you miserable. Then make every effort to try and be like Jesus, to “love one another as Jesus loves you.” The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than just “not doing” stuff. It is about coming unto Christ, being perfected in him, and denying ourselves of all ungodliness. Discuss with your companion what commandments and mission rules are for “Misery Avoidance” and which are “Come Further into the Light”! And, remember, commandments are ALWAYS connected to huge blessings. The Lord promised, “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:20–21). Whenever we obey any of God’s commandments, we will get the blessing associated with that commandment. Elder David A. Bednar said: “The gospel of Jesus Christ encompasses much more than avoiding, overcoming, and being cleansed from sin and the bad influences in our lives; it also essentially entails doing good, being good, and becoming better. Repenting of our sins and seeking forgiveness are spiritually necessary, and we must always do so. But remission of sin is not the only or even the ultimate purpose of the gospel. To have our hearts changed by the Holy Spirit such that “we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” (Mosiah 5:2), as did King Benjamin’s people, is the covenant responsibility we have accepted. “This mighty change is not simply the result of working harder or developing greater individual discipline. Rather, it is the consequence of a fundamental change in our desires, our motives, and our natures made possible through the Atonement of Christ the Lord. Our spiritual purpose is to overcome both sin and the desire to sin, both the taint and the tyranny of sin.” I LOVE this concept—and as I have paid attention, I feel like apostles are trying to teach us this all the time. Are we listening? Let me repeat what Elder Bednar said. He said that the commandments help us change what we WANT. Why is that important? Remember my teenage desires? I wanted to be as close to the line as possible so I could still look cool for my friends. That is a good example of the “tyranny” of sin. Even though I was not actually sinning (probably because I was afraid of my mother), I still had some small desire to sin. I said, “I can’t. I’m Mormon” with many dramatic sighs. Overcoming the tyranny of sin is getting to the point where the sin no longer looks remotely interesting or fun because we are too busy loving our neighbors and trying to be like Jesus. Elder Dallin H. Oaks said: “The Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts—what we have become. It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become.” This talk was given when I was on a mission, before most of you were born. It completely changed my perspective on the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is called The Challenge to Become” and I recommend that you study it. When the Lord says keep the commandments, he isn’t just telling us to stop sinning—he wants us to become like Christ and to have joy. Take a moment and think, Where am I on this continuum? Remember that none of us is perfect like the Savior, and we all need to lift one another. That is why we worship together. That is why we have priesthood quorums and the Relief Society, Primary, and youth organizations. The Lord taught us that truth when he said we all have different gifts: “To some is given one [gift], and to some is given another [gift], that all may be profited thereby. To some it is given by the Holy Ghost to know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified for the sins of the world. To others it is given to believe on their words, that they also might have eternal life if they continue faithful” (Doctrine and Covenants 46:12–14). The Savior is still WAY over there: a thousand miles away somewhere. That is why we have quorums. We all have a long way to go. Let’s link arms and run together. Let me finish by telling a story from my mission to support my testimony of Jesus. Years ago my mission president said something interesting: “Either the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is truly the kingdom of god on the earth... or it is the greatest fraud ever in history.“ It is audacious to claim to be the true Church of Jesus Christ—but let me explain exactly why I know that to be true. I always BELIEVED that I was raised in the gospel of Jesus Christ. My parents taught me well and I felt good following the commandments and studying the scriptures. That led me to serve a mission in Brazil. My turning point of testimony came when I was 20–at least 2/3rds through my mission. We were invited into a house in the “fundos” of a property—a small structure built behind a larger house. The man was polite and allowed us to share our message. As I had done hundreds of times, I shared the story of Joseph Smith, a boy who sought the truth through prayer. I recited Joseph’s own words in response to his prayer: “I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me... When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" I felt the strongest feeling I had ever experienced—an undeniable confirmation that what I said was true. It hit me in a way I can never forget! I knew that Joseph Smith was truly a prophet, and therefore the Book of Mormon was the word of god. What about the man we were teaching? How had he responded to my life-affirming spiritual experience? He shrugged and politely thanked us for the message. I was stunned. I felt like the windows of heaven opened on me—and he felt nothing. I learned that receiving answers to our prayers is like tuning a radio: not everyone is on the right frequency. For some reason, the Lord decided to broadcast on my frequency that day. I received the undeniable confirmation that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true. I have built on that foundation brick by brick since then. And every time someone has challenged me on Joseph Smith, I go back to that day in Brazil. I know that he was a prophet. My life has been blessed in ridiculously good ways since then. As I have tried to follow Jesus Christ, great things have happened to me. Even my hardest and most frustrating times have turned out to have a purpose. God has upturned my best laid plans over and over. But I look back and realize that I could never have planned any better. With the prophet Nephi I say: “I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things." (1 Nephi 11:17) When I say that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, that does not mean we have a monopoly on truth. I know Christians and Muslims who teach me to be better—and Members of the church who are far from disciples of Christ. We just have more truth: scriptures, living prophets, ordinances, personal revelation, and answers to many of life’s biggest questions! That is pretty cool. But we can’t be prideful about the truth we have. You have all probably met people to admire both inside and outside of the church. So, I am all in. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true—not a big fraud. And we are all trying to get closer to Christ. I know that Heavenly Father has a plan for me. Life has not been what I expected, but I trust him! I know that Joseph Smith is a prophet of Jesus Christ and that the Book of Mormon is true. This is “intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth. Light and truth forsake that evil one.” With that knowledge, keep the commandments! In the name of Jesus Christ, amen .

Bradford G Smith (Brad)

20,383 views • 11 months ago